


novitiate

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: A/B/O, Ableism, Alpha Ben, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Are Omegas Psychic? Maybe, Background GingerRose, Ben Solo Cottagecore, Ben Solo Tied To a Cross That’s It, Bittersweet Ending, Caretaker Ben, Catholic Guilt, Catholicism, Convent, Empathy Bonds In All The Wrong Places, F/M, Forced Marriage, It’s My Porn So There’s Angst, Jealousy, Knotting, Mating, Mating Bites, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mild Blood, Mildly Dubious Consent, Miscommunication, Misogynistic Omegaverse Society, Mute Ben, Muteness, Now With No Pregnancy, Nun Rey, Omega Rey, Omegaverse, SecretBazineTrash, Setting: Nunnery, Suicide mention, Tags Are Expanded Upon in Opening Notes, Unprotected Sex, ambiguous setting, dystopian themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:22:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 53,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25532809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: “You’ll be safe here. No Alpha will ever see you. Except for him,” her smile is sad as she peppers in a mention of the Alpha as an afterthought. “He’s our caretaker. He mostly fixes things around the convent and attends mass with us. He won’t issue any commands to you.”Rey doesn’t move until the breeze from the window drops the scent. Even distant, it’s strong.Bazine snorts at Rose, her drumming abandoned for now. Rey does hope this isn’t a common habit for a roommate.“In order to issue commands, he’d have to talk. At all.”Bazine emphasizes this by making a cutting motion with her hand across her throat.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 335
Kudos: 1361





	1. Chapter 1

Being sent away for her own protection—protection from what she is—is the greatest cruelty she has ever known. 

This new life is faced with a grit jaw and a bruised sense of optimism. Rey is too old to be  _ just _ an orphan anymore. 

Now she’s a nun instead.

The little car slides her up the mountainside with a dubious amount of momentum: she awaits when, like a child with a sled, the wheels no longer grip the incline properly and the whole hunk of metal sails down the slope with her and the driver inside. The driver is a pretty Beta woman, silent and assured, who had asked Rey if she wanted anything to eat on the road. 

She should have said yes, but was too nervous to try and enter the real world moments before she would have to leave it. The higher the elevation they climb, the more she regrets that fear now. 

The car seems fully unable to handle the climb. As precious as she is treated as the cargo inside, it’s a strange little image that keeps her almost laughing to herself. She, sacred Omega, more importantly  _ sacred womb _ in her body, tumbling down the hill to her death before she ever reached the convent.

Every few miles, they pass a wall made of stones that edge into the pavement of the road. Loose rocks litter the ground like the wall had just been demolished only for the car to pass through. She stirs in her seat when she sees one and raises her eyebrows to the grumpy old priest who picked her up from the station. There’s no explanation for them: by means of protection, they’re only hip-height, and wouldn’t even keep a child out. The mountain road yields three of these stone walls, they all look the same, in the same hastily dismantled state for the car to just slip through. 

The car impossibly makes the climb up the mountain after the third wall. 

She’s a little disappointed when it does.

* * *

The white veil weighs heavy around her skull. Her shoulders slump with the added weight. She already misses her hair, hidden underneath, though she’s wondering if it will be shaved when she takes her vows.

“Do you know who the Carmelites are?”

Rey shakes her head, feeling slightly strangled in the action by the bunched fabric at her throat. It’s modest, but more importantly it properly hides her glands. 

The nun helping her into her garments gives her a sad smile and helps her pin a section at her throat that is too loose. 

“The Order of Carmelite Nuns live a cloistered existence like us. Our intention is a bit more...maternal. Like a divine mother. Some other orders are more involved with the outside world through acts of charity: but we are bound here for contemplation, prayer, and sacrifice.” 

_ And,  _ it goes unspoken,  _ to keep our ideal wombs safe. _

Her lips thin at this information. She didn’t ask to be born an Omega. From her short life as one, she wouldn’t think anyone would. She was half-saint already, especially as a virgin, her heart one that bleeds a fresh trail for a hunter to follow. All she had to do was sacrifice herself for some orphans, doomed already to some kind of violence, and the benediction would be hers. 

_ A Godly Burden. One given to Eve to bear. _

She remembers that pre-presentation ignorance of her childhood, when she first learned the stories of the first Alpha and Omega in the garden. She thought she wouldn’t have to worry about that curse, dubiously called a blessing, as a woman’s curse often became when children were involved. 

After she presented, she had also hoped that keeping herself from any Alphas that came sniffing would be an effort that would eventually be rewarded: not punished by being placed in a nunnery in the middle of nowhere because she hadn’t mated at the right age. But because she hadn’t taken a mate, she was sent here straight from the orphanage when she reached the right age, where her untouched womb was considered sacred. 

Vaguely, she knew it would be worth more to him by staying that way.

“You’ll be safe here. It’s not so bad.”

This little crack in the Sister’s smile, a sadness confessed, not that things were wonderful but that they were not so bad, softens Rey’s dark expression for a moment. She glances into the eyes of the nun in front of her, properly, for the first time. 

“What’s your name?” Rey asks quietly, only just then wanting to know. 

The girl's heart-shaped face is augmented by a line of dark fringe coming from under her wimple: another novice, from the white that matched Rey’s veil. 

“Rose,” the other Omega says with a sweet smile. 

Rey’s heart aches for her for a moment. Every loss in her life that she faces, with her upcoming induction into the order, flies out of her and lands on how she sees Rose. No Alpha to care for her. No mate. 

“I’m Rey.”

Rose seems to read it in Rey’s eyes. Rey knew about how Omegas had an advanced empathetic connection to each other, but she was never around enough Omegas to truly feel it. The occasional maternal waitress or teacher, safely mated and claimed in order to be able to work, sometimes used those feelings to put her at ease. But she’d never opened herself up to that potential bond, as foreign to her as a bond between herself and an Alpha.

Rose takes her hands and squeezes them. 

The sadness flows between them for a moment. Something that must enter the body eventually, like air. 

Then Rey flinches away like being burned: the surge of emotions inside her far too much. She is to be trapped with women like herself, isolated here, and probably jumping at every emotion in the room. 

This is a nightmare. 

* * *

If Rose seemed resigned to her life here, Rey’s roommate, Bazine, is actively resentful. More than Rey can even manage to be. 

Rey feels slightly better hearing that Rose is across the hall with her sister, Paige, when she meets the wild Bazine. 

Her wimple is black, so she’s already made her vows, though does not seem to be embodying them. Stretched out on her bed, hammering a pen between the metal bars of her bed in a way that makes the furniture seem like a jail. Rey is not sure if anyone else here can recognize it, but the warbling clang vaguely evokes the guitar riff of a popular rock song from a few months ago. Hearing the precision in which Bazine evokes them makes her sure Bazine knows it too. Longing for the outside. 

Everything in the dormitory is chilling bare, like people aren’t living here. Perhaps they aren’t. Pre-Saints. Vessels of God. 

The room itself adds to the haze of boredom that blankets the dormitory. Floral wallpaper that must have once been cheerful is now the color of weak tea and peels at the edges. The furniture is painted hospital-white. The hall must be filled with young women but it’s eerily silent. The chipping white paint picks up the gray, cloudy light from outside and gives everything the greenish hue of a dirty fish tank. 

Rey leans her shoulders against the door, Rose on her other side in the hall, not eager to enter the room that will be hers. 

“What is it exactly that we do here?”

Rose hums and clicks her tongue as she thinks over her answer. 

Bazine smirks at her. 

“Isn’t that one of life’s eternal questions.”

“I hope you don’t mind crafts,” Rose adds weakly. “We knit a lot of blankets and scent them so babies in the hospital can cuddle with them and feel safe. If not you can be assigned kitchen duties. The food’s not bad, we can have bread and meat and vegetables, but not a lot of sugar. There’s a good library, if you can find a way to argue that it’s enriching you spiritually they let you read just about whatever you like.”

“No music other than that organ crap,” Bazine growls, but she holds up a worn paperback with a black cover and a haunted-looking, waify blonde staring straight ahead. “But I said this one was about how sinners are eventually punished for their lust because the ending is sad. Whole lot of lust in this book.”

Already Rey is picking up on the loopholes for the nuns here. That’s very different from orphans. As long as they’re not doing anything, it seems, they can do whatever they want. It’s about keeping them safe, separate, secluded because they’re too valuable for their own choices. 

A sharp scent twists in Rey’s nose. She flinches back in the doorway, her suitcase of modest belongings thudding against the frame. 

“What is that?” she asks quietly, blinking from Bazine stretched across her bed and Rose, who has contained all the answers she’s received about this place so far, when a heavy musk flickers in from the open window. 

It’s unmistakable. And  _ close.  _

An Alpha. 

Bazine cracks a smile at Rose. 

“She got it already. We’re in trouble.”

Rose kindly takes Rey’s suitcase and sets it down on the empty bed. Rey trails behind her, numb. She should probably unpack. Instead she can barely move. She stares at the open window as she stands in front of her bag. What if the Alpha can smell her?

Bazine pounces the minute Rey’s suitcase clicks open.

“Did you bring anything good?”

Rey doesn’t know what counts as  _ good; _ as she has had few luxuries even before she entered this place to give them all up. 

“What are you looking for?”

“Lipstick?” Bazine says hopefully. “Records? There’s a record player in one of the recreation rooms. We’d have to keep it quiet, but we could sneak down to listen. I  _ need _ music.”

Rey digs through a pocket and takes out a mostly-finished tube of pale pink. Bazine grins as she uncaps it. 

“Not red,” she mumbles to herself, seeming frustrated, but she still applies it with care. 

The lipstick wasn’t really Rey’s. It was loaned by a classmate and Rey forgot to give it back. She’s not attached to her act of thievery and so surrenders the makeup to Bazine, since it was never really hers, hoping it cancels out the wrong she had done. 

Bazine tosses the lipstick to Rose, who doesn’t seem like the type to get excited for makeup, but still snatches it from the air and puts some on herself. 

“No music,” Rey adds quietly. Absorbing so much melancholy at once from the other Omegas is overwhelming. She settles in and, taking a cue from her roommate, snatches up the black paperback to page through without asking permission. 

_ —knotted in her tight heat, the most forbidden embrace— _

Her hands jerk as she flips the pages further, trying not to blush.

There would be none of that here.

“It’s just this?” Rey asks finally, the question clearly on everyone’s mind, “Forever?”

Bazine is still rubbing her upper and lower lips against each other, a small mirror appearing in her palm, like a little girl who’s never worn lipstick before. 

Rose shrugs.

“They use privileges to get us through the day. Magazines and hikes and stuff. Sometimes they bring in a film projector so we can see movies, there’s popcorn and everything. But yeah, that’s about it.”

“The Alpha—” Rey lowers her voice like he can hear them, which is absurd on the third floor of a dormitory in a convent, “—he never goes into a rut? Surrounded by all these Omegas?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Bazine seems strangely cautious, even with so little impression Rey is surprised to see her step off the gas so quickly, “He’s...strange. But harmless.”

Rose straightens and sends a wave of comfort to Rey.

“You’ll be safe here. No Alpha will ever see you. Except for him,” her smile is sad as she peppers in a mention of the Alpha as an afterthought. “He’s our caretaker. He mostly fixes things around the convent and attends mass with us. He won’t issue any commands to you.”

Rey doesn’t move until the breeze from the window drops the scent. Even distant, it’s strong. 

Bazine snorts at Rose, her drumming abandoned for now. Rey does hope this isn’t a common habit for a roommate. 

“In order to issue commands, he’d have to talk. At all.”

Bazine emphasizes this by making a cutting motion with her hand across her throat. 

* * *

During her welcome at dinner, the senior most nuns urge her to accept this vocation into her life with grace. This Order, made up entirely of Omegas like herself, is a role of the most sacred vessel of the church. 

Untouched. Maintained. Empty. 

It is strange that such an important role was not made into a choice for a single Omega in the convent. Rose is resigned, but did not choose this. Her sister Paige, the Beta that drove Rey from the orphanage, took this life to be here with her. And anyone would be crazy to assume Bazine chose this for herself. If the oaths were of such great importance it would seem they would need to be faced willingly. Vows falling falsely from her lips seemed counterproductive. 

Especially when biology taught their bodies one thing, and faith another: heat was not something to be resisted, like temptation. 

To the credit of the Order, no one tries. It’s just a burden to bear.

Girls are isolated in an infirmary, already isolated in the thick of a forested mountain, their cries bouncing off stone walls when they go into heat. They are cared for and sheltered. They are protected from the outside world. But pretending that they would ever choose to remain untouched when all it took was one Alpha’s command—

Rey watches the dining hall empty of black-and-white veiled heads empty like chess pieces sliding around a board. Rose takes her elbow, indicating she should follow.

It was just foolish. 

* * *

After her first night, Superior General Holdo enters their dormitory. 

Rey isn’t expecting her, in fact is still asleep when there is a knock on the door. She glances at the dim light coming in from the window. She had expected her days to be long, but nothing like this. It’s early, even for a nun. 

She sits up in bed, wondering if she’d forgotten something, but Bazine doesn’t even stir.

“Don’t get up,” her roommate groans, “they’re just here for your scent.”

Holdo enters with a calm about her that implies it is just a common errand. Rey lifts her head from her pillow, confusion buzzing in her slight wakefulness. 

“Rey,” Holdo says in a calm, meditative tone, “I need your pillowcase.”

“What?”

Her Superior reaches behind Rey’s back like she’s not even there to delicately shuck the case from her pillow. It’s all done in a fluid motion, like it’s been done a thousand times.

Rey’s hair is unbound, and it already feels strange to have someone else seeing her like that. It falls over her shoulders, which she knows is more fragrant than when it’s tucked into a wimple. As much as she already hates it, wearing them makes sense. Sometimes she’d wrap her hair in a scarf if she was going out alone. It didn’t hide what she was, but it didn’t further fan out her scent if it was contained.

That same scent is clinging to the fabric in Holdo’s hand. 

“Thank you. We’ll have a fresh pillowcase brought to you when the girls on laundry duty are awake. You may go back to sleep now.”

Rey sinks her cheek onto the scratchy pillow as Holdo whisks herself out of the room like she was never there. It was both efficient and incredibly strange, stranger still because it is done so clinically. Like drawing blood.

She licks her lips, staring at the ceiling, trying to gather her thoughts enough to ask Bazine what the hell happened before she falls back asleep.

“What was that for.”

Bazine grumbles like she had hoped Rey wouldn’t even ask.

“They give them to the Alpha so he can adjust to the smell of the new girls. He won’t have to investigate as much by the time he sees you.”

Rey stares at the ceiling and swallows. This is spoken of like a simple procedure, but it just seems dangerous. 

And soon, without her even being present, the Alpha was going to scent her. She isn’t sure she likes that thought. 

“Why is he here?”

Bazine’s careful pause is palpable. Rey can tell she’s holding herself back. 

“He’s here to protect us. From the other Alphas.”

* * *

She doesn’t see him at all for her first week. 

His smell is  _ everywhere. _ She knows more about his duties around the convent just by scenting where he was. A neatly repaired pew in the chapel. The flowerbeds under the kitchen windows. The pipes under one of the sinks reek in every nook and cranny like his nest.

There’s a horrifying impulse to curl up there under the counter amongst his smell and close the cupboard door.

Rose finds her hunched at the open cupboard door.

“You get used to  _ him _ after a while,” she promises with a sad smile. 

It doesn’t stop, at least not yet, but she can tell sometimes when she gets the faintest whisper of Alpha and her body goes rigid that she’s the only one reacting this way. She’s used to finding his smell, alert for it, but nobody ever hands her a pillowcase to scent him like he would be scenting her. 

It’s unnerving, the idea that by the time she’ll see him, he’ll be  _ used to her. _ Just like all the others. 

Without seeing each other, or shaking hands, or knowing each other’s names. She’s curious if he ever was told hers. Rose will talk about him when pressed, but only in a tone that he was so insignificant she didn’t need to provide much detail. Rebellious Bazine, as game as she seemed for gossip and the forbidden, completely clammed up whenever he was mentioned. 

Rey pulls her focus to working out what in the library was actually readable, and trying her hand at the work that filled the days here. She’s not a good knitter, but they still have her in the room to cuddle the finished baby blankets before boxing them up for the hospital. It’s there she gets to know the other girls in the Order. She’s never been in a room full of Omegas and the empathy connection is enough to knock her out some days. They are all swimming with each other’s emotions, and when two girls are fighting, everyone in the room feels it. 

Rey doesn’t like that these moods can hijack her own emotions. She resents them. There’s so much noise inside her that cannot be dulled: it’s almost deviously clever in how distracted all the sisters are from how they affect each other. It’s an endlessly occupying activity. She actually looks forward to prayer and meditation, at least at first, because all is tranquil until one of them locks into a particularly painful memory in the silence and then the entire pew weeps. 

Prayer and contemplation, prayer and contemplation. It will fill the rest of their days, this mercy that this place protects them from Alphas. When a girl in the real world, an Omega from the neighboring town at the base of the mountain, is compelled by an Alpha to strip her clothes off and follow him for three miles on foot just from his command, the nuns aren’t sheltered from the story. The newspapers reporting about it are passed around like scripture:  _ Isn’t God merciful because we are safe here?  _

Sometimes, to clear her mind, Rey goes to the infirmary to help Paige. Other than the priests, Paige is the only Beta here, and has been given nursing duties solely because she will not be incapacitated with heats when someone needs care. Paige keeps those girls hidden, hydrated, and hopefully soothed as their bodies tear themselves apart in longing. 

There is a day where Rey is told to bring a tray over for one of the girls during meals: and when she enters the infirmary, from behind a curtain she hears a chilling whine. 

Her curiosity does not extend to what will happen when it’s her turn. The orphanage did ice baths that left the girls shaking for days after the heat left. 

There was nothing beautiful behind the mysteries of being an Omega. Asking questions was like opening boxes she knew all contained scorpions; but still looking to see what color the next one was.

* * *

  
  


Bazine’s birthday is at the end of Rey’s first week. She feels like this adds to her bad luck, for not having anything for her roommate to immediately prevent offense from darkening their relationship. Rose sneaks her a magazine she’d been hiding from Bazine the day of and that settles the matter too closely for Rey’s comfort. 

She only has a moment to breathe when Superior General Holdo approaches with a small, expectant smile. 

“Novice Rey, would you help with the chairs in the chapel for Sister Bazine’s surprise?”

Rey nods and goes to leave for the chapel immediately, she still had the urge to complete her tasks promptly just to be given something to do, the other girls warned her it would fade, but her Superior catches her shoulder with a gentle hand. 

“You will be assisting our caretaker. He’ll have to scent you in person eventually. Don’t worry, he has never reacted to one of our Omegas, so we can stop prolonging the inevitable. Go and help. Keep God in your heart.”

It’s like being told to dive off a cliff: but after a week of feeling other Omega’s loneliness and homesickness and fear: she honestly wants nothing more than to be alone away from it. Even with an Alpha she hasn’t met. 

There’s too many feelings being passed around to know where the source of them comes from, let alone what’s coming from herself. 

Going to the chapel without them seems cleansing. As soon as the door closes behind her she feels that she can breathe. 

She can hear the clanging of the folding chairs from up above when she enters the chapel, overhead where the choir rehearses. There’s a few sets of chairs propped along the walls at the base of the stairs, Rey dutifully picks up as many as she can carry with the backs hooked over the crook of her elbows and makes her way up the steps. 

She can smell him already. The faint scent of his sweat as he works. 

Her ears pick up every sound as she climbs the steps. There’s a churning, mechanical  _ chunk _ noise as the chairs are opened and set down one after the other. He has to anticipate her approach, but he doesn’t seem to slow in his work as she moves up the stairs. 

He’s setting down a chair with one hand on the back and one hand on the seat and looks at her when she stops at the top of the stairwell. 

She wishes she could go back in time and request his pillowcase. To work her way up to this moment. So she could have been prepared. 

It’s too much. 

She grips her skirt and tries not to move, like a rabbit in the grass, awaiting the jaws of a sniffing wolf.

He’s huge. And a wolf isn’t a stretch of the imagination. Dark and grim-looking with a large, muscular body. 

Bazine morbidly calling him their protector makes perfect sense. She is startled by how much she instantly feels safe knowing he’s here, now that she’s seen him. Glad that he’s theirs.

_ Alpha will protect you.  _

He combs his black hair out of his eyes and sighs for a moment before looking back at her. Her fear at all which he could do to her, making her forget her own mind, dissolves in a second at his impatient expression. 

He doesn’t seem to  _ want  _ to make her do anything at all. 

“I’m new here,” she blurts out, gesturing to the white novitiate veil on her head, “but, I guess you can see that. Or knew that. Because they gave you my—”

It feels too deeply personal.

_ What did you feel when you first sensed me? _

_ Will you judge me for how I feel now? _

She swallows and sets down her chairs with a glorious  _ clang, _ cacophonous and echoing like the church bells overhead. 

“—pillowcase. But my roommate Bazine told me they do that with everyone.”

She shoves open a chair with too much force. She bites her lip and glances at him. 

He’s still staring at her. 

“I’m Rey. I was wondering if they told you that. When they gave you my—scent.”

She’s not sure why her voice got so quiet.

He doesn’t say anything.

He looks at her ponderously for a moment, considering her, and then goes back to work. When his chairs are all open, he brushes past her and makes his way back down the stairs. She can hear him picking up more of the folding chairs, probably twice what she could carry, from the way his task here is mostly completed without her. 

She steps out of his way as he comes up with six chairs slung in his arms. 

“What’s your name?”

He enters the room without looking at her, but then glances at her over his shoulder, seeming almost offended, as she attempts to get out his way. 

Something occurs to her that makes her blush. 

“Are you—allowed to talk to me?”

He narrows his eyes inquisitively, snapping open a chair. 

He nods. 

“Oh,” she goes to unfold one of the chairs, arranging it to close the circle where there would be a little party later that day for Bazine. It didn’t seem very correct for a Nun to receive a surprise party, but more than one person had told Rey that if they didn’t treat the girls to the occasional celebration, there would be a riot. 

Especially if Bazine didn’t get one. 

He’s still silent, nudging a chair with his boot so it scrapes across the floor into place. 

“Do you  _ want _ to talk to me?” 

He takes a moment to react to the question. He stands up straight, abandoning his work, and seems to think about it while watching the dust swirl in a sunbeam. He doesn’t rush his reply.

He looks back at her again after a pregnant pause in contemplation and just shrugs. 

Her face flames. 

She doesn’t know why she feels so dejected. She is clearly completely safe from him. It should be a relief. Any doubts that he wasn’t just circling the grounds for his pick of the Omegas here, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, have been put to rest by his obvious disinterest. 

But still, it’s that hope she still clung to, after all this time waiting, that maybe here she would be found. 

* * *

It is especially painful to be made a fool of with a paper party hat secured around her head with elastic. On top of the veil.

Rey kept to herself during the party, but it seemed that while prefacing her meeting with the caretaker with any information was forbidden, once it was known she met him all the girls wanted to know about it. 

The giddiness inflated the connection of everyone in the room to the point they were all drunk on it. Excitement waiting for Bazine to see her surprise increased Bazine’s excitement when she saw it and by that point they were all giggling madly. One of the Superiors even relented use of the piano where someone was attempting to replay a pop song from memory. 

It was not played well, but there was a rush in Rey’s brain at recognizing it, a song she heard on the radio and thought she’d never think of again, just the bones of it coming from clumsy fingers on a piano.

Bazine takes this chance, while everyone is distracted, to tease Rey. 

“So you finally saw him,” Bazine’s tone is heavy with implication. 

Very little in this place can be done alone. As soon as Rose senses the intensity of her curiosity, she joins the fray as well in the corner of the room.

“We just set up the chairs together,” Rey answers lamely, glancing at two expectant faces. Clearly every girl was hoping for what Rey was hoping for. If not for themselves, for someone else. Just for it to  _ happen. _ If not mating...to at least be noticed by someone. Recognized. To have hope. “I think he hates me.”

Rose tries to be kind about it.

“He keeps to himself. I think he’s explicitly ordered to. And he takes those orders seriously, which is nice to know, if he’s charged with keeping us safe and all.”

Rey feels worse knowing that he in fact  _ was _ allowed to speak with her. 

“Holdo made me clean chicken coops with him to have us get used to each other,” Bazine adds like it’s the height of cruelty, “he did not want me there, I was so little help. It was  _ disgusting.” _

“But you stayed because he’s an Alpha?”

It’s not an accusation. It’s because Rey gets it. How she didn’t leave even after he rebuffed her. She just helped set up the party in mortified silence. She couldn’t leave his side. 

Bazine blinks at her. 

“Yes, actually. And the fear of him is kind of pointless, because he can’t command or anything.”

They kept saying he couldn’t. What did that even mean? Was that an oath he took in order to live here amongst them all? Rey was sure that technically she couldn’t punch anyone in the face; but it was proven that recesses spent on the blacktop at the orphanage that she would once provoked.

He was on a mountain with a hundred provocations. People never responded to all of them the same way. The idea that sin offered existed in a neutral way always annoyed her. The sin itself the whole context. That was not how Rey came to know her sins.

But he was not at all provoked by Rey, so her belief may stray from his.

“I tried to talk to him. He looked at me like I was crazy.”

Rose raises her eyebrows and Bazine’s mouth dropped open:

“What do you mean, you  _ tried  _ to talk to him?”

No one had told her she  _ couldn’t. _ Was she supposed to arrive at a nunnery and assume nothing was allowed? That would get boring if she let that stop her from trying things before being told for sure.

“I asked his name and everything and he wouldn’t even answer me.”

_ “Oh,” _ Rose intones sadly as Bazine screeches “Oh  _ shit!” _

Rey swallows, feeling sweat fill her palms. They weren’t supposed to curse but whatever she had done to provoke the word seemed to outweigh that rule.

“What? What did I do?”

Bazine, who has proven to not be easily shocked, has a hand over her mouth.

“He’s mute.” 

* * *

That night there’s a scent so sharp it burns her. It’s like someone ripped the sheets off of her body. She is thrown awake by it, her eyes flashing open, blinking in the dark at what grows closer.

She hadn’t known that she was so used to the Alpha’s scent until another Alpha crept nearer. It’s only when this scent frightens her that she realizes his had begun to bring her some comfort.

It’s distant, but distinct. Rey lifts off her bed and sees Bazine is still fast asleep. Why are her senses sharper? Isn’t her roommate smelling this? It’s  _ so _ close. 

She ignores the chill in the air as she crawls over to the window. It would be smarter to hide. But she feels too alerted. 

It’s too dark to see much, but a figure enters the main grounds from the woods. She can see him plainly emerge from the trees. He has orange hair and black clothes. He’s not stalking, not prowling. But he made it up past the walls on foot. 

A car couldn’t reach them to take them far. But a man could take them far enough. All he had to do was cross the gate.

She’s not the only one to smell the Alpha out at night. 

The mysterious caretaker crosses the courtyard with something in his hand, maybe just an old twisty piece of pipe, clenched in his fist. There’s a weight to it that makes that arm hang down his side. He’s so large, he could probably take the redhead on empty-handed. But the intimidation in the object in his fist is clear. 

Then he stalks over to the main road, where the other Alpha hangs back, hovering, scenting on the other side of the fence even though it’s clearly rude to smell whatever it is he’s protecting. Threatening, even.

She shouldn’t lift the edge of the window just a crack to see which smell is more dominant: but she wants to. Like it’ll decide something.

She has an unfamiliar feeling at her window, above this confrontation, that she wants to see who wins.

She can see the stranger ease himself away from the entrance of the gate, dipping back a few steps. She wonders if the stranger will make the same mistake she did. Try and talk with him. 

Fail, just like she did.

Her spine bristles with the observation that he doesn’t need to talk for whatever is happening now. What he’s here to do. She’d put her money, if she had any, on him beating any intruder they had soundly.

Their Alpha may not be able to say anything back: but whatever was on his face over there clearly spooked their visitor. 

Whatever happens, it’s clear the stranger knows he’s not getting what he wants here. The other Alpha stands down and creeps back into the night.

  
  


* * *

Holdo has another task for her to cross paths with the Alpha by the end of the week. Whenever she's told to approach him, it's done in so bland a tone that her doubt that this is a good idea is entirely her own, as is the fault. Like _she's_ the filthy one for thinking this could go badly.

Her mortification must be placed aside for now. 

She is getting a break from the mind-numbing domestic work and can go help the Alpha with the wall so the new arrival can make it up the mountain.

The mystery of the rock walls on the side of the road is solved for her: the Alpha assembles them as roadblocks so only expected cars can get in. If an Omega is to be taken, it’s not a convenient trip down the mountain. When this is explained to Rey when she asks why she is being asked to help the caretaker disassemble a whole wall, the answer isn’t as comforting as a thing put in place to protect her should be. 

She pictures herself, or sweet, trusting Rose, being dragged to the base of the mountain through the woods, where a van awaits them running idle by the main road. How elaborate that abduction would have to be.

If an Alpha wanted to take one of them, access to a car probably would not be a priority. Just getting an Omega as far as a bite would.

He waits for her with a wheelbarrow at the top of the road. Bazine is there, in the wheelbarrow. He doesn’t look happy about this as Rey approaches. 

She messes it all up again by asking him, not Bazine, “Is she helping you instead?”

At least he can’t tease her about her mistake. He’s the only one in the entire convent that hasn’t yet. 

_ “No,” _ Bazine answers, drawing it out because Rey has only addressed him and is still looking at him like he’ll answer, “I'm being a nuisance.”

The Alpha let out a sigh like he would so much rather go about his task without either of them. 

Rey takes the handles of the wheelbarrow and starts to tip it on its axle. Bazine squeals with horrified delight as she is almost dumped out. 

“Okay, okay!” Bazine hops out of the bucket and heads up towards the courtyard. “Christ, Rey. Have your Alpha. Maybe he’ll whisper back some sweet nothings this time.”

Rey almost strangles her. It’s one thing in the dormitories, but he can  _ hear _ them.

The Alpha himself reclaims the empty wheelbarrow and is already rolling out down the hill. 

It takes two of her steps to keep up with his stride. She’s breathless by the time she’s contained her humiliation enough to catch up.

Rey is feeling itchy from the weeks of kitchen duty and laundry duty and praying over baby blankets. This place is so boring. She plays with the idea of the Alpha like a weapon, like a child too young to be given a hunting knife. 

They reach the first rock wall. What she hasn’t seen is the wall when it’s built across the road: she’s only seen it taken down for her arrival. Obviously he has to do this every time a new girl comes. It must be part of how he knows they’ll be there, handed a pillowcase, forced to get acclimated to this strange forever.

“That’s not enough to keep us in.”

After what happened the other night, she wants to push him. Test him. Seen what happened when he got close to a breech in the convent’s security.

The Alpha shoots her an inquisitive look. She hobbles on the uneven ground to the waist-high stone wall and swings a leg over. 

“If we ever want to escape,” she gestures at her legs, straddling a mass of stones and  _ daring _ him to stop her. “Just hop on over—”

The Alpha breathes at her for a moment of perfect stillness as she wriggles over the other side, considering if she’s making an honest threat, and then neatly grabs her by one arm and hefts her over his shoulder. She clings to him with a yelp, assaulted all at once by beautiful  _ scent. _

Before she can even think about being in his arms he sets her back down on the ground and begins to load the stones at the center of the little road into the wheelbarrow like nothing happened.

The only evidence she has is that his presence lingers. 

His smell is earthy, a little dusty, but pleasant. Like an old book. He seems more careful and less sloppy than the other Alphas she’s seen: they make for good athletes, but they have to play in their own league or they’d end up injuring the Betas. 

And no unmated Omegas are allowed to be in attendance of those games or else someone could end up dead. 

Despite that display, he’s not like the jock kind of Alpha though. What is clear from it is her threat was answered: what stopped them from escaping was him. 

His hands move more gracefully though, there’s a thoughtful furrow in his brow as he works. 

She draws near, watching his shoulders flex as he works. 

Is she not threatened because he has so many Omegas around him, he’s just used to it? Is just a few sniffs of a pillowcase is all it takes to make him immune? 

It is incredibly rare to have this many Omegas in one place. She’s met more of them here than most will meet of their own kind in their entire lifetime. He truly was a dragon that slept in a hoard: but cursed to never enjoy the spoils. 

It was fascinating, some virtuous knight that protected a cult of virgin maidens. Who would choose that life?

Rey creeps over to the wall that already has a good portion piled into the wheelbarrow to be cleared from the road, and lifts a stone. And Jesus, they are heavy. She wobbles as she drops it in with the rest. 

“They want me to help you because I’m not good at anything,” she finds herself saying, bitterness hardened on her tongue. 

He sets down a stone beside hers and raises his eyebrow at her. 

It’s the most he’s communicated with her since she arrived. His precious shreds were so dismissive. This look is at least an answer. 

Or a question. 

She swallows and hefts up two more stones from the wall. 

“The crafty stuff. The knitting. The cooking,” She sets down the rocks in the wheelbarrow with a grunt. “I’d rather do labor, honestly. This is already a prison. Might as well act like it.”

He looks deep in her eyes for a moment. 

This is more explicit honesty than she’s even shared with Rose or Bazine. She hates it here. It’s miserable, thinking about how she’s going to be stuck here until menopause, and even then probably having nowhere else to go when that hits she’d be here until she died. 

That realization makes her sick. And she’s having it with him in her eyes. In her head, it practically feels like. 

She swallows and goes back to the wall. 

“It’s not the worst here,” she continues nervously. “I’m just—I don’t know. Maybe I say that because I have nothing else. I came from nothing, so I might as well be here.”

She sets the heavy rock in the wheelbarrow and looks at him. He seems unsure what to do for a moment, standing there, not focusing on his task. He seems to be contemplating what to do, or maybe how to react, that would be appropriate here. His hands and posture are loose and open in the midst of the forest, a place where an Alpha should be prowling to her, unprotected Omega, like a wolf. 

Then he just shakes his head. 

Her eyes widen. 

He really doesn't want to listen to her talk. He even managed to disagree with her just to prove it.

Rey bows her head and clenches her teeth as she goes back to work. Somehow she continues to manage the impossible. Perhaps she is a saint, performing miracles everywhere she touches.

It’s not the reaction he seemed to have expected. After a moment, standing there like he expected his little roadside vaudeville act to receive thunderous applause from his audience, he joins her in the work and they both ignore each other for the rest of the tedious, hard work together. 

But at least that hopeless cycle keeps her hands busy while her mind is flushed with mortification. 

Why did she tell him anything?

* * *

Rey pointedly avoids the Alpha, even mentally, out of embarrassment. It’s easy, for a short time, maybe the first cycle of weekly chores they don’t cross paths without actively running the other way when he appears. 

There’s a new girl: she’s a pet of the nuns for being the most devoutly Christian in her upbringing before coming to the convent, but in the dormitories she shows all the other girls these photographs she has of herself in lacy underwear that she sends out to admirers for a fee. 

It makes the place more interesting at least.

When someone asks her to bring fresh linens to  _ Ben _ she blinks at them for a few seconds, not knowing where the hell that name came from. 

Tallie, the girl on laundry, looks ready to smack her. The annoyance becomes a mirror to Rey, an endless storm that feeds back and forth from something deep in each girl’s blood. Rey locks her jaw and fights the instinct to escalate the mild hysteria bubbling. 

That’s how it starts here. In a moment they’ll both be screaming over nothing.

“Who’s Ben?”

“Who do you think?” Tallie brushes her steam-soaked hair out of her eyes. “How many big, strong men are lurking around the convent? Do you know any Father Bens?”

Rey holds the fresh stack of linens to her chest. They smelled perfectly clean, but if she kept smothering them like that, they’d only smell like her. 

Not clean at all.

“He has a name?”

Tallie raises an eyebrow like Rey is a few cents short. 

“It’s Ben.”

“Did he tell you that?”

Tallie purses her lips. She appears to be taking a moment to think over if Rey is the dumbest person she’s ever met. Her annoyances threads Rey like a needle. It feeds back so she’s just as annoyed with herself. 

_ “Right,” _ Tallie goes back to her work. “He’s been here a long time. We didn’t exactly need to be introduced.”

“How long?”

Tallie shrugs as she hefts up a basket of habits.

“Beats me. Years and years: but he definitely didn’t tell me that.”

Rey, chastened, takes the linens and wanders out of the laundry room. 

She knows that he lives off a path that winds behind the chapel. Too remote for them to stumble upon accidentally. She has never wandered down to see it up close, because there hasn’t been any reason for her to ever dare, but clearly this errand is normal if it’s being asked of a Novice. 

She breathes the open air and is happy at least that the chore carries her on her feet instead of cooping her up in a dark room. The grass parts along a slender dirt trail, then grows into brush, then trees. There’s birdsong and fresh air and so much light dappling through the leaves. 

It’s been a faint wondering how he can stand this place, the deadened humming sound in the main building, the weeping, the dangerous tangle of smells. But she already envies his isolation in just a short walk. It must serve to clear his head.

She knows that the most dangerous thing to  _ her _ is in fact where she’s headed, not in the forest surrounding her, like a girl who knows the wolf is already in the cottage. 

She just cradles the bundle and hopes he’s not home. 

The house is dark when she arrives. Darker than the overcast outside. It’s always cloudy here. She doesn’t want to question if it is seasonal, if the planet will tilt and bring the sun to the right angle to finally appear from behind the clouds, but all the days here have been gray so far.

She wants to hurl the sheets onto his porch and run. But faintly, she hears a low grunt from the house. 

Not like something hunting her. Something weak, and vulnerable, and maybe even hurting. 

Rey swallows and creeps closer to the cottage. She feels she should go back and return with help, but what feels stronger is that the need for her is immediate, from her. That’s a distinctly Omega instinct, and she tries to fight it, see reason, that she couldn’t do much more for anyone hurt by herself. It is not her purpose to sacrifice herself for her need to lick wounds. 

But she’s already on the porch when she feels like she shouldn’t do this. Already getting close to the crack in the windowpane where the sound of moaning is loudest. 

It’s the Alpha, and what’s with him is not a victim. 

Because he’s alone.

He huffs into his pillow, on his hands and knees on his bed. She’s looking into his bedroom. The house is so dark that only the light of the window guides her eyes, it faintly glows against his blue shirt, the mass of his legs, and lastly the flushed skin of his cock in his hand. 

That sight occurs to her last. By then she’s frozen, hooked by his musk. His massive fist brutally strokes himself. In his other hand, shoved up against his nose, is a white square of fabric all bunched up in his fist. 

A pillowcase. 

Is this what he did with all the new girls?  _ Hers—? _

She’s frozen in place, staring through the broken window at his body as he touches his body. His mouth hangs open, teeth bared, as he snarls to himself. He sounds like he’s in pain. 

He needed to be  _ soft.  _ Pity slipped through her heart’s guarded surface and pulsed along with the blood in her veins. That rough touch wouldn’t do. Alpha needed a gentle, soft mouth to seal over his angry-looking cock. Someone to suckle him sweetly and moan when he rewarded his good Omega by filling her pussy with his cum. 

She wants to lick the sweat from his neck. The sheen of it entices her. To show him her neck, the mark there, pink and swollen for his teeth. There’s a shyness to approach him: shyness in fear of what she wanted. 

_ Go to Alpha. Kiss Alpha.  _

His lips, or should she just get on her knees at the side of the bed he knelt on and press her lips to that perfect cock—

She blinks a few times in surprise at herself. This was an Omega hindbrain reaction that up until this point she had been able to avoid instead of fully ignore. It was always there. Risking her entirely. She just assumed she had perfected taking the right steps so not to set it off. Not stumbling upon it for so long had made her begin to think herself above it all. The distinction between those two things, avoidance and control, is clear now. 

Her first instinct was to do those things.

Her second is to lift the skirt of her dress and touch what she wanted to give to him until he found her there, wet enough for him so he could step outside and—

The second instinct didn’t necessarily mean it was smarter than the first. 

Hopefully the state he’s in doesn’t have him looking up and finding her there. 

If he commanded, she would have to go in there. At his command, she would have to do anything he asked. 

If he could command. 

She doesn’t exactly feel safer this way. Just because he can’t, it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t if he could. What he wants in this moment is a mystery to her. 

He slides his cheek along the fabric in his hand longingly, snuffling against it—

_ Linens. Right.  _

Rey bends and sets them down on the porch in front of her. The boards creak as she does. 

She winces, and crawls back down the steps without rising, on her hands and knees. As soon as her feet hit the grass, she bolts from the cottage and hopes he doesn’t come and find her. 

* * *

Rose goes into heat the following day. 

Her presence is sorely missed in the dormitory, at meals, even her pretty voice in chapel is mourned. 

As is Paige, who can’t just leave her sister, or any of them, unattended in the infirmary during this phase in their cycles. As one of the few Betas in the Convent besides the priest, Paige is usually permitted to drive into town once a week if no one is in the infirmary. She can pick things up from the General Store and shows an indifference to if they’re considered appropriate for the nuns. Comic books and cosmetics and snacks. But with Rose in heat, Paige can’t make her upcoming trip, and the dormitories fester with those hopes being crushed dead and still rotting...

Paige is more drained than usual when Rey delivers the fresh linens from the laundry to the infirmary one morning. 

“Lock it behind you, quickly,” she hisses as soon as Rey lingers in the door, letting the outside air in and the musk of heat out. 

That was foolish.

The nurse is wiping sweat from her brow, an agitated look in her eyes. Having an Omega to care for was hard on families. That’s why so many daughters ended up here. But it must be sad to watch a sister go through that. 

Rey sighs and shuts the door to the infirmary behind her. She locks the imposing upper lock installed above the knob. 

Designed to keep Ben out.

“I can watch her, if you need a break.”

Paige covers her face in her hands. Rey gives her a moment to think it over. She clearly needs it.

“I really shouldn’t,” and to prove her point, there’s a wail behind one of the curtains. Paige looks like she’s going to be sick at the sound, “there’s just nothing I can do for her until it’s over.”

Rey sets the clean linens down on one of the chairs by the front desk. 

“It won’t do her any harm to have just me here for a little while,” she soothes, wishing Paige did have their connection for a moment so she could send some comforting feelings to her.

Paige sniffs for a moment, wrung out, from behind the curtained section of the room Rose is yipping like a puppy that had its paw stepped on. Her sister flinches and her face crumples up in pain.

“It’s so hard,” Paige shakes her head, “I brought her here because I thought it was safe...”

Rey wants to soothe, but the nurse just stiffens and shakes her head. Seeming to sense that she was falling apart, and in this situation, that helped no one.

Paige shudders while she looks over at her sister.

“I know you will want to. But do not,” Paige says slowly, not even looking at Rey, “under any circumstances untie her.”

Rey swallows and nods. 

Paige wets her lips. 

“Ten minutes.”

Again, Rey nods, and Paige sweeps herself out through the door so quickly it’s a blur: mostly a slam and a lock clicking shut again from the outside this time. Rey lingers in the entryway, but feels horrible over Rose’s sounds. 

She’d have to see what happens here eventually. She might as well know before it was too late.

Rey rounds the edge of the curtain. The bed itself is veiled in a filmy material like mosquito netting. At first Rey can’t imagine the purpose, but catches the scent clinging to the netting that encases and disguises the scent of Omega in heat. 

Rose is tied to the bed, loosely, padded cuffs keeping her hands and feet extended but enough to kick and thrash without hurting herself. She’s a mess of sweat, trembling, blinking at Rey in terror. 

It had to be like this. For days. For all of them. 

Rey’s lower belly knots with anxiety and sympathy at her distress. And fear, for herself, as she feels this poignantly while she can even move her hands and feet. The thought of being tied makes her want to sprint down the mountain, only for the Alpha to chase her down and heft her back up. 

Ben. His name was Ben.

She goes to the end of the bed and grips Rose’s bare foot. 

Whether it is soaked from sweat or slick, she doesn’t know or care. It feels like the only safe place to touch her. Rose howls at the contact as if burned. 

Rey steadies her breath like she does when she pretends to pray in Chapel. She doesn’t really seek the Lord: but the moment of silence does calm her down in her daily routine. It doesn’t fix her problems, and even though she just does it because everyone else around her seems deep in prayer, it doesn’t mean taking part has made her worse for it. Her head bows as Rose struggles, and she feels all the pains of heat flare up between their connection. 

Rey sends out a soothing wave like a cold blast of air. Rose tenses up, spine arching, and then after a moment goes lax against the sheets. 

Something leaves Rose and enters Rey. Enough to have her feel rattled inside. But Rose’s face is no longer tensed up with the strain of her heat. 

It’s not much, but it’s enough to keep her calm until Paige returns and finds them: utterly shocked to see her sister lying still. 

She lets out a sad sigh, both of them watching her impossibly sleep. 

“It never gets easier when it’s your little sister. Sorry,” Paige wraps her arms around herself, “I do feel sorry for having to do this to you. But it keeps everyone safe.”

She doesn’t know why she does it. Betas don’t understand. But maybe it helps Paige to see that the suffering is not alone. 

So when Rose arches and whines again, Rey grits her teeth and pulls that ache straight from her body. 

Paige notices, blinking between the two Omegas with her mouth falling open.

“Can you explain that trick to me?”

“It’s usually more trouble than use,” Rey murmurs, her eyes locked on Rose’s labored breathing. 

“You’re shaking.”

Rey nods as if she wasn’t listening, and she might not be. Paige sets a hand on her shoulder. 

She flinches it off. The aftershocks of the cramps she absorbed want for touch; but not from a Beta.

She thinks of him for a moment, wanting to fling open the window and let him devour her through the bars. 

But she has to be reasonable. That just puts Rose in danger. He’d go straight to her.

“What do you do if he ruts?”

Even with locked doors, it seems too dangerous to have a tied Omega in one place if that was a risk.

Paige stands up straighter. 

“It’s...rarer. Though not even I want to go near it then. That’s a job for a priest. Usually he gets tied up in the chapel until it’s over.”

* * *

Rey keeps her wary eyes on him in the chapel that night. 

Holdo took one whiff of her at supper and immediately sent her back to the dormitories to bathe off the scent of Rose’s heat. 

There was an idle threat in the order to wash herself: clearly it was potentially dangerous for the scent to travel. 

Showering alone was a new experience since the orphanage. The water’s not particularly, hot, but she never expected it to be because before it never was. Not when she happens to wake early enough to catch it, it’s a small pleasure. And no matter the temperature, no one scolds her for taking long showers, and she wonders how else she would respond to greed if she had any reason to grab for it, because all of her showers are impossibly long.

The separate stalls seeming luxuriant. It was odd that the modest lodgings of a cloistered nun were not sacrifices to Rey, where she only had to sleep in a room with one other person, eat simple food that was not expired, not minding the shock of cold water on her skin in a shower where no one could see her tremble. 

Her hair is wet and dampening her wimple more and more each moment of vespers. It makes her feel oddly dewy and warm, like the steam never let her cheeks. 

Rey kneels in the last row of pews, alone, because she arrived late and didn’t want to disrupt service by making everyone slide over to make room for her. 

He enters later than she. He does not share her bench, but instead removes himself to the last row on the other side of the chapel. 

How could he come to the place where they tie him up in a massive rut and act like it was still sacred.

He’s at every service that the nuns are forced to attend, but he’s there willingly, and has more enthusiasm for them than the girls do. It’s plainly not an obligation to him, despite not being a devout member of the church. Maybe he sees himself as some kind of protector chosen by God. 

She can tell from how he bows his head, stares straight at the pulpit, and crosses himself without that slight delay of the girls who have grown too bored to keep up. 

She looks closer: it almost looks as if sometimes his lips move along with the prayers. 

* * *

Rey isn’t possessive. She isn’t  _ jealous. _ She doesn’t have the earthly possessions to create a greedy person.

Despite her indifference to her life here: she also wasn’t much a sinner in the life she was taken from.

But she sees something that makes her absolutely  _ feral _ for hours.

For all her feigned indifference, she sees him approach the infirmary after chapel. 

He doesn’t go inside. He has his hands in his pants pockets as he skirts around the building. 

She half-wants to cry out so someone catches him.

_ Rose is inside. He’s prowling. _

But she’s much more curious how close he gets to the bait inside.

Ben stops at the window of the wing she knows houses Rose and reaches for the bars of the window. 

She sees it, the purest white slip folded in his hand.

Someone’s left him a note.

The attention of an Alpha would make  _ any _ Omega react strongly: especially deprived of it. Especially given elsewhere. 

She slinks back onto the main path to the courtyard and huffs to herself, face burning. 

The Alpha’s probably got a secret sweetheart.

This shouldn’t bother her. 

Normally it wouldn’t. If she could go home: she’d have enough space to let it go. It shouldn’t be humiliating that she’s done nothing but embarrass herself in front of him for weeks. But this makes her feel wretched, kicking the stones under her feet, chin wobbling, her anger so terrible she skips dinner and seethes on her bed until Bazine comes back, hovering in the doorway, unwilling to get closer or she’ll just start frothing with rage too.

“Rey,” Bazine pleads from the door, “I just came in to get my book, and I almost bit through my tongue when I walked in here. Whatever it is, you have to let it go or everyone’s going to start murdering each other.”

  
  


* * *

Rey could do worse for a roommate. Some girls here were so bored they became pious just for something to do. 

Bazine is rebellious, and fun. Bazine is the only one other than Paige seemingly immune to the emotional bond that drags the girls around like their hearts are all bound together by chains. She roars what she remembers of rock songs out of her chest, it looks hilarious when she lies back and does so while wearing her wimple and dark dress. If anything she lightens them all. 

If anything she belongs here the least. 

One afternoon when they’re supposed to be washing dishes from lunch, Bazine grabs Rey’s hand with a picnic basket slung over one arm and they go running together into a clearing out of sight from the main buildings. There’s not much bounty, but some leftover cake from Bazine’s birthday. They stretch out together on a blanket in the grass and Bazine performs a toned-down version of her wailing singing, quieted so they wouldn’t get caught. 

“It’s so goddamn hot,” Bazine complains, and it’s true, without even a trace of sunlight. It’s muggy out, and at least bright gray, not dark. But these garments are restrictive for a reason beyond God. 

Bazine grimaces and yanks a pin out of the gathered fabric at her throat. She throws a daring glance at Rey. This isn’t something strange between them, they see each other’s hair in the privacy of their room all the time. But out in the open—

It’s too deliciously forbidden. If they don’t fight at least a little, this place will eat them. 

Rey follows suit. Rebellion together feels like going down with the right ship. She can’t remember the last time she was outside with her hair free, the wind lightly tossing it. But the Superiors and the Priests keep telling them that they’re safe here.

Both Omegas moan lightly as they scratch their fingers into their own scalps, ruffling their hair, laughing, and then lying back in a tangle on the blanket with it spread loose like their limbs.

Rey arches her throat to feel the breeze on her neck. It’s the most intentionally exposed she’s ever made her neck, her glands, and for good reason. She touches the pad of her thumb to her gland, feeling, hating how it’s always just a few degrees warmer than the rest of her body.

“This is dangerous,” Rey says after the giddiness ebbs away. 

It’s with a sad voice, which she can feel rise in herself and press into Bazine, and even awaits the moment she’ll sense it as Bazine shoves the feeling away.

But Bazine holds the morose words and lets Rey’s weight rest them against herself. 

“The world is too dangerous for anything, or so they keep telling us.”

Bazine rolls onto her stomach and stares at the grass in front of her. 

“We’re vulnerable from Alphas—”

Her roommate snorts at her. 

“Alphas have to come and find us when they sense us. They have to have us fully at their will to mate us. They’re triggered into a rut by our heats. Do you ever think there’s power in being bait?”

Rey clicks her teeth together in nervous contemplation. 

This sounded more dangerous than anything else going on on this blanket. Bait? To an Alpha? When all it took was a command to submit completely, regardless of what was right and wrong?

Not even the devil was that persuasive. 

But at least the devil’s way, being ruined was a choice. 

* * *

She hadn’t realized she had even fallen asleep on the blanket until she woke up.

“Rey.”

She doesn't know how long they had lain in the blanket-covered grass. The light had changed. The birds that chirped so prettily as she dreamed are silent. 

_ “Yes?” _

She didn't quite feel awake until she heard the tone of Bazine's voice. 

“Put your veil on.”

She lifts her drowsy head, not sure how long they had been out together in a tangle like a litter of puppies. 

“What?”

“Put. Your veil. On.”

The pervasive smell of  _ Alpha _ fills her lungs.

Rey whips up onto her knees as she remembers where they are. Alone in the woods. She tugs her simple off the ground and over her head, a strand of sweaty hair falling over her forehead.”

Bazine clutches here to cover herself with a hand fisted at her throat.

But she doesn’t move. 

Rey follows her eyes across the clearing. 

Ben isn’t racing at them, but he stalks purposefully. Bazine crawls back on her hands and knees a pace or two, until her palms hit grass, and then she’s up like a shot running back towards the main building. 

Rey swallows, enraptured by the sight of approaching Alpha for a moment, and then gasps and lifts onto her feet when his eyes lock on her and he starts to  _ run.  _

She remembers how effortlessly he tossed her over his shoulder: and when he did that he certainly didn’t look like this.

She can’t tell which way Bazine went other than towards the courtyard. They’ve lost each other. 

So much for the empathetic connection that made them all stick together only when they were alone, a defenseless brood. Because it did not keep them at each other’s sides now.

She can’t blame Bazine’s instincts any more than her own. The same ones telling her to run as fast as she can from Ben. 

She makes it as far as the wall along the chapel when two large arms wrap around her waist and lift. A wail escapes her throat when he presses her against the stone wall behind her. He looks  _ furious.  _

Rough, focused hands tug her loose wimple aside, freeing her hair. 

Ben  _ buries  _ his face in her hair. 

She wheezes for a moment like a mouse in a trap letting out that last exhale, shuddering in his grasp as he noses around the loose strands. Sniffing. His hands roam her form possessively but not lasciviously. She’d seen in movies how there seemed to be intention in that touch of a more seductive man. Deliberation. This is all clumsy instinct. He checks if she’s truly there like a person checks to make sure their keys are in their pockets. It’s pure hubris to think he can keep her still without a command and yet she doesn’t dare move. The hand on the back of her neck and the one around her hip are just to keep her in one place, she is unwieldy like gold coins spilling between clutching fingers. 

His touch turns tender when he lifts her hair aside and bares the gland on her neck. 

Rey goes as still as death. All it takes is one bite and she’s his. For the rest of her life. 

Not that he could do much with her: considering there was nothing he can say to make her bend to his will. Nothing he can say at all. 

His fingers thread into her hair as he tilts her chin back. Nuzzling. His nose moving back and forth against it. Her gland runs a few degrees hotter than the rest of her body at all times. His skin brushing against it makes it feel swollen, like it’s going to burst. 

Like it needs his teeth to break it. 

Something feels like it has burst: the garments between her thighs that are meant to collect errant slick are barely fulfilling the job. She runs like a river for him. Her clenched thighs are locked open even as her knees go weak. She sinks in his arms only as much as his hold will allow: without it she’d been on the ground.

His lips touch the swollen skin. Then his tongue traces. Slowly. A light tickle that has her cunt clenching for him. It’s so good, and so wrong, and quite like standing at the edge of a cliff. 

Rey has never felt strongly about her pre-Sainthood. But now it might be the only thing she has. 

_ Take me. _

He mouths so perfectly at her throat. 

_ No, don’t. _

“Please don’t—bite,” she hisses. 

His hand wraps around her arm, above her elbow, and the other stays tangled in her hair. But he steps back. Eyes wide. Mouth hanging open. 

He does something that stops her heart. He scoops up his hand and covers his nose, breathing hard through his mouth, and stumbles further away like someone has cut a leash, and he was now free to leave her.

“I’m sorry I didn’t cover myself,” she tries to reach for the veil on the ground, but her arm just rotates uselessly in his grip. “Let me put it back on.”

He bends at the waist and snatches up her veil. With shaking hands, he sets it upon her head and she gathers the fabric under her chin so tightly in her fist, her knuckles turn white. 

Ben hangs his head and steps away from her. Grave-faced. It’s like once the spell of their biology is broken he can’t even look at her. 

That shouldn’t bring her despair. But it does. For a brief moment she almost forgives the insane measures taken to protect her now that she’s faced what she’s being protected from. 

She came so dangerously close to never belonging to herself again. 

Rey swallows and pulls away from the wall, her trembling hand propping her up against the stone when her legs shake too much to go any further. She sinks onto her upper arm against the wall. Leaning. Staring at the ground in shame. 

Ben huffs a few times and steps further away. She can see from the corner of her eye his chest rising and falling with labored breath. Like  _ she  _ wounded him. 

He leaves her to catch her breath against the wall. 

Pulsing with a hollow feeling for whatever she had abruptly stopped: she had also almost wanted to happen. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Spoiler but also content warning: I was leaning towards A/B/O as mild body horror this chapter. So TWO IDIOTS get caught while knotted. Not going to say who.]

“Do you have anything to confess?”

It has been one week since her last confession and Rey swallows after the question as it feels like her tongue has turned into a ball of fuzz. A lot has changed since last week.

_ Did she? _

Confession was a strange ritual around the convent: the nuns could do so little, so they either dismissed the daily drama in the dormitories or they already assigned themselves rosaries as penance to clear the air. But usually they all just agreed to forget about it unless it made things interesting. 

_ “About once a year there’s a fight where everyone takes sides for weeks,” _ Bazine told Rey one night, pointing the direction where they both heard screams at the end of the hall, three voices each claiming ownership of a hairbrush, “Then everyone forgets about it.”

Rey plucks at her skirt as she sits in the hot box of the rectory. She coughs. 

The priest maintains little authority on the premises: a Beta with light blue eyes. Holdo and the other Superiors help much more power in the organization of the dormitories and duties. Going to confession felt like a hasty cover to make it necessary for a man, other than Ben, to even be around at all. 

What did she confess? That she saw another perform the sins of masturbation and watched? Was  _ that _ a sin? That she was held by someone seized by an instinct referred to by the church as lust, but didn’t seem capable of being controlled enough to blame anyone for. At least not Ben.

She faintly remembered the irony of the only person who seemed genuinely devout on the compound being unable to repent for his sins from his own lips.

And yet everything that has happened with Ben feels like, if she says anything, it will be her fault. In a strange, at least half-way, it seems that it is.

But there was her jealousy over the note. But that would mean admitting what she saw Ben do: which she had no further proof was anything bad. There was admitting why she’d feel jealous about anything surrounding Ben at all. Or why she watched him so closely. 

This place was too complicated for self-reflection.

“Sometimes I listen to secular music,” she says blandly instead, the material of her skirt fisted in her hands as she sits back on the wooden bench. A harmless sin. One of defiance that wouldn’t do a thing to hurt anyone other than, perhaps, herself. “I use the common room record player.”

There’s a long pause from the other side of the confessional, then, through the grates, she sees the Father nod once. 

“And now what must you do?”

Rey feels the words escape her, wetting her lips, blinking at the shadow through the grates.

“I—”

_ “Pray.” _

The voice rasps severely at her. It falls like the strike of a rod. She flinches.

Rey nods dumbly before she realizes she is supposed to say something. 

“Thank you, Father.”

She assumes she has spared herself any deeper scrutiny. 

“You may go, my child.”

Her tongue feels coated in ash. 

“Thank you.”

* * *

“What do you think he gets out of this?”

The girls lounge around their room. It’s Rose’s turn with the romance novel, she reads cross-legged by the light of the window. Bazine lounges with her head on Rey’s lap. It’s a rare sunny day, and while she can feel the itch in her roommate, and herself, to go outside. They haven’t dared since the day Ben caught them.

But they all have their veils off. It’s too hot for them, and they can hear a Superior mount the stairs from a mile away in this building, in case they need to pull them back on. 

It’s safe to break this rule in their rooms, anyway, Rey thinks as she plays with the shiny black strands of Bazine’s hair. 

Bazine closes her eyes with a snort.

“Father? A whole world where he gets to make all the rules.”

“No,” Rey threads some strands around her fingers to weave a thin braid, “Ben. Protecting us. It’s not typical for the ratio of Omega to Alpha to be so...generous.”

_ And yet: _ he didn’t touch any of them.

Except maybe Rey. But that was a secret she wouldn’t even tell her priest.

_ Especially _ not her priest.

And She still didn’t know who he picked up the note from. Knowing it would be there. 

And the pillowcase. 

Perhaps he had them all, in some way. Perhaps that was his reason to be here.

Rose glances up at her but doesn’t answer. It’s feigned disinterest, when it’s clearly hooked her attention even if she doesn’t supply her opinion. 

Bazine’s answer is just as mysterious.

“Don’t know.”

At this rate she’ll never guess who the note was from. Not that she thinks of it  _ too _ often. 

Just when she wants to feel something that no one else in the room is feeling: like a hot rush of blood from a fresh cut.

“Don’t you think it’s odd he never found himself a mate? Especially here, surrounded by perfectly normal Omegas, you’d think after a few months...”

Rey glances out the window like she’d see him cross the courtyard and somehow know she was talking about him, “How long has he even been here?”

“He’s always been here,” Rose replies quickly, “he’s not so bad. Maybe he feels just as much a slave to all this as we do.”

“What do you mean?”

Rose swallows, romantic text sprawling in open pages across her lap. 

“Do you think he feels good about himself when he ruts alone? It’s painful enough going into heat in the infirmary. He wouldn’t agree to it and stay here if he wasn’t here for a reason. I think he sees his duty here as the same as ours.”

“I think he likes that we’re virgins,” Bazine says cryptically, interrupting the tension that furred at the edges of the room. “Makes him feel like he’s guarding something sacred and that no one can play with his toys. Even if he can’t play with them either.”

Rey can’t help the bite in her tone: 

“What, did  _ he _ tell you that?”

Bazine cackles, her neck arched over Rey’s thigh. 

“You’re always so jealous. You say that like he’s told  _ you _ things.”

_ He has, _ she almost answers, but out loud it feels foolish even when in her heart it feels true. 

So she says nothing, and lets the conversation end even when she’s not satisfied.

* * *

The record player in the common room abruptly breaks. 

Rey is so used to disappointment she only registers it with a light pang of annoyance when one morning it doesn’t play music anymore, like it died in the night. 

The new girl had snuck in a few records, but they had all warped in the sun, so it wasn’t like the surreptitious use of it brought her any pleasure. She hadn’t even been the one to switch it on. 

She didn’t give it a second thought until later in the day she heard a sound like someone kicked a dog. A yelp of pure pain that had her running from the kitchen to the common room. 

The record player they crowded around to listen to sermons when the Superiors were within earshot and packed tighter around to listen to  _ dangerous _ music when they were not is still busted on the windowsill. But frantically turning all the knobs like she is trying to send the thing into space is Bazine, yelping in pain, hearing nothing but silence. Rose has already come behind her to hold her, kneeling on the floor and screeching. 

The automatic instinct Rose has now is clearly to stroke her hair, but the veil makes that impossible.

“She’s near her heat,” Rose says to Rey after a moment of broken howling, “I’m sure this isn’t an easy time to—”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Bazine shrieks, striking the floor with her fists, just for something to hit  _ “stop talking about me like I don’t even exist.” _

It fills the whole room, all at once, so fast it’s impossible to trace who the feeling came from first. The feeling that maybe, sequestered up here, it’s like they truly don’t exist at all. 

* * *

Rey hopes no one sees her taking a breath outside the kitchen.

It’s after lunch, so no one is there, and it’s the only place she can be alone for five minutes. 

Bazine’s frenzied pulse still echoes in her chest and she struggles to slow it down. 

She isn’t doing anything wrong: but the fact she will probably have to answer what she was doing out here later on already makes her face flush with anger. She sifts through her feelings, combing through them all but settling on none of them. Some aren’t even her own. 

Breath becomes more difficult. She folds over and huffs with her face at her knees. 

Bazine’s anxiety about her heat makes Rey twitchy and anxious. She tries to purge all these emotions from her, knowing they’ll just fill her the second Bazine gets near again. Just like Rose’s mourning of her parents will slice through Rey like a knife at the wrong time. Or Tallie’s feelings about how she looks in this wretched uniform. 

She keeps sifting, sifting, searching through a million grains of sand in her mind and trying to find the black pearl that contains one thing about herself she knows to be true. 

_It’s easier if when you’re mated,_ a health teacher once told her. _Your thoughts become one._ _Adolescent Omegas all bleed into each other. There’s no barrier until they find an Alpha and bond with them._

Trading one invasive mind for another. 

_ So you never really find yourself. _

Rey sniffs someone else’s tears out of her eyes and looks into the woods. She’s so focused on the depths of the forest that tempts her that she doesn’t hear him walk up.

She smells him first; and by then he’s quite close.

She startles when she takes her hands away from her eyes and sees he’s too close to pretend he was just passing her for convenience. 

He’s at her side.

Ben settles onto the stone wall beside her, leaning on his palms, his arms neutral at his sides. She’s noticed he adopts these weird stances when he’s around the novices. Like he’s trying to assume a position lower than them, proving he doesn’t mean any harm. 

He sort of has to as the fox that lives in a chicken coop.

He casts her a curious look, glancing down at her eyes, she takes it to mean to ask what’s wrong.

“I’m fine,” she shakes her head, inhaling deep and focusing on the forest just like she’s looking at something pretty. “I’m not running off, if that’s what you’re here to prevent. I know I wouldn’t get far. You’d find me.”

There’s a promise in there that he doesn’t refute, perhaps the first thing she’s said to him that didn’t have him shaking his head stubbornly at her. If he found her again, like last time…

She keeps dreaming of his lips on her neck. Not his teeth, like before, but his soft lips nibbling her skin. Not even at her gland, not every time. Sometimes the slope of her jaw or even where her throat isn’t marred by the heated skin on a gland. Just his mouth being kind to her, cradling her arched jaw, wandering the passage of blood and air and bone that barely kept her head on straight these days. 

He keeps looking at her now. Waiting. But her head is too full to know where to start, and it’s not like he can ask. 

The confessional in the chapel always obscured the priest from her vision when she went for her weekly reconciliation. Instead of a reverent shroud over the whole affair, she could look right at Ben now and see a placid calm. Not too needy. Contemplative. Nonjudgemental. Comforting.

_ He would have made a good priest,  _ she thinks, though not sure why. Or a bad one: since she almost just then tells him about her dreams.

But now he’s just a person. Not even fully an Alpha, if there’s not much he can do by way of command. And he looks at her like it won’t help her to talk to him: it will help him. 

“I feel powerless,” she says suddenly, her heart racing and something fiery rising inside her. Rage. Her own. “These are supposed to be my vows and yet I couldn’t leave here if I wanted to. Where’s the sense in that?”

It’s so familiar, yet lost, that she grasps the hand reaching out of her anger like a lifeline. Because it’s finally not someone else’s feelings. 

It’s hers.

“Whether I choose it or not, I’m just stuck waiting for—I don’t know what. Because if it doesn’t come I’ll just die here.”

She glances at him from the corner of her eye. Did he have a choice for things to be this way for him? An Alpha among them, snake in the grass, a threat looming over their heads to not leave?

She looks at him for real for the first time since he came over to her. Their eyes meet.

Ben tips his chin to his chest and then juts it out as if to motion  _ Go on.  _ Coaxing her.

This little communication makes her go cold for a moment.

She had forgotten that thinking Ben couldn’t understand her was a dangerous thing. He obviously can, has demonstrated it enough that she can see him communicate with her before. 

Her words did not fall into silence when he absorbed them. 

Her mind flickers to the broken record player. 

Confession was not a safe place. The empty click of the record player was proof enough of that. Talking had consequences. 

Her failure was in doubting his intelligence. 

Who did Ben report to? Because if she attempted to escape, he’d drag her right back up that hill to the church. Was all of this just to be watched closer, tied tighter?

She’d break.

That comforting smell was like truth serum. This safe embrace so dangerous. She couldn’t imagine the pull he’d have with his full voice. Anything he wanted. All of it. 

Her heart was softened by pheromones, this place made her mind dull, but she could cling to the last of herself.

Ben’s lips purse together at the look on her face when she takes a step away from him, re-opening the distance between them.

“I shouldn’t have—”

But already that’s too much, and she covers her mouth with her hand. 

He looks hurt, his eyes narrowing in confusion as she steps away from him cautiously. She doesn’t expect him to understand, unable to compromise himself the way she just has. 

She can’t rebuke him too openly or what she has exposed will become his weapon.

“I guess I’ll see you at Mass,” she says lamely, and trots off to the dormitory, leaving him alone in the shadows of the trees.

* * *

Bazine isn’t in her bed that night. 

She didn’t go to the infirmary that evening either. Rey was there to help sweep up and Paige had mentioned to send Bazine straight there if she saw her. 

Rey lies awake with her lips tightly pressed together. She doesn’t want to make things worse for Bazine, as exhibited by her obvious pain this afternoon. The last thing she wants is to involve the Superiors, or even worse, a priest. 

But it feels wrong to not have Bazine safe inside. Her worry burrows deep and jagged into her flesh. She rolls around under the sheets and kicks her limbs: unable to rest. 

Rey creeps out of bed and wanders the halls. There’s a faint chance Bazine is in another room, seeking comfort for the night Rey might not sufficiently give. She searches her heart for any pains as she brushes her hands along each door of her fellow sisters. Dimly, she’s aware that if Bazine were here, she would feel her. 

She’s not. 

Rey swallows and creeps to the stairs. Maybe the common room? Trying to repair the record player?

All of her hope is pinned on finding Bazine there, but the room is empty. She’s out of options. 

She can feel her heart in her throat as she thinks of Bazine in the woods. It’s late, too late to not be just as guilty if she wakes anyone now to tell them Bazine never came to bed. Rey should have told someone hours ago. If anything happened to her: it’s her fault too. 

Rey trembles as she wanders to the kitchen door. 

Somehow this has become her problem to fix. 

Curse her bleeding Omega heart. 

She holds her breath as she opens the door and slips out into the night. 

There’s a gravel path leading to the front gate. She casts her steps lightly as she creeps to the fence with no forethought towards anything but getting there. If Bazine is not hunched in the grass at the wrought iron, then Rey is out of ideas. 

No sooner than her feet hit the grass does the wind bring a scent to her nose that makes her stop still. 

_ Alpha.  _

Ben stalks into the light of the sole lamp in the courtyard, the lamp that illuminated him the other night when the other Alpha came to investigate. She hasn’t been near him since he caressed her gland the other day. 

They both seemed to make a point of avoiding each other after that strangeness. 

He looks furious now. 

The way he’s moving towards her signals to every synapse of her brain that he’s about to haul her over his shoulder and put her to bed himself, which will obviously get her into even more trouble. She holds up her hand as he approaches like a speeding train, but she doesn’t step out of the way.

“Bazine’s missing,” she says when she finds her words, hoping her pleading tone will appeal to him as an Alpha. And she does need his help. “It’s almost her heat. I think she ran away.”

Ben stops dead at her feet, and even though he still looks like he wants to drag her back to her room, he takes a few pointed sniffs of the night air. 

His expression remains dubious until the wind changes and he catches it, leaning into the smell, his eyes wide with recognition.

It’s just when he gets a glazed expression that Rey realizes maybe this isn’t a good idea. 

Ben turns on his heels like she’s not even there and lopes over to the woods. She trails behind, but he pivots at the gate and shoots a death glare at her when she gets too close. The order is clear. 

To get back to bed. 

She hikes up her nightgown anyway to clamber over the fence after him. She’s not leaving Bazine alone for something that is  _ definitely _ her fault now. 

There’s tension in Ben’s shoulders under the moonlight as he stomps down the hill. It is very obvious he knows she’s following and he’s not happy about it. When she nearly trips on a branch, barefoot and already regretting it, he stops and grabs her hand. 

It’s more practical this way, no unsteady ground in the dark. Few times he even slips and she keeps him from tumbling, so there is a reason for maintaining the grip.

It’s obviously unremarked upon as they walk holding on to each other through the dark. 

They find her at the third wall. 

It’s almost disappointing for Rey. She was  _ so close _ to making it. Freedom feels even more tempting when she knows the road to civilization is so near. But with the relief Rey feels to see her safe, distressed and curled up in a ball but  _ safe now, _ makes it clear even Bazine knew how unsafe it was as well. 

Rey crouches in front of the distraught Omega. Her sister. 

“We need to get you back up the hill.”

“I don’t want to be tied up.”

She has a choice to make and she doesn’t like making it. Wherever Bazine wants to go she’s in no state to get there. 

Is the lesser of two evils still a sin?

Rey glances wearily at Ben behind her. From the way Bazine is shaking, it is clear that her heat is  _ close.  _

Dangerously close. They’re not far from the main road. Anyone could have found her. 

“Please, Baze, you’re safer up there than you are down here when you’re in heat.”

_ “They’re just going to lock me away.” _

Ben grumbles in this odd way Rey has discovered. Like a purr, deep in his throat, but troubled instead of satisfied. 

He seems to be making this choice for them. His duty is to. 

He lifts Bazine gently as she seems unmoved by her vulnerable state. 

After a few steps up the incline though, he groans and folds himself over, hunching possessively over Bazine. 

His nose presses to her jaw for a second. Rey feels that pain of his investigation straight down to her gut.

But just as quickly, he snaps out of it and lurches away by the neck. 

It wasn’t like how it was when he touched Rey. That was slow and deliberate. She can tell from the slick she also smells that he will have as much luck holding Bazine like this as he would holding open flame. 

She braces her arms under Bazine, even if he’s got it, as it’s not to take weight but to lock her arms along Ben’s. It’s to keep him from carrying her off with both of them forming a basket hold for her body. 

This might be read as a direct challenge to him as an Alpha. Either way it’s very stupid to get in his way, even stand this close, when the smell of Bazine coats them and makes her knees kind of wobble. 

Rey closes her eyes. What she's feeling isn’t  _ her. _ It’s Bazine’s heat warming her blood, making her breath tightly through her nose, pulling grasps of Ben’s scent. 

He doesn’t wrench Bazine away from her. He looks straight away in her eyes for a moment.

Rey wets her lips as he looks like he’s waiting.

“We just have to get her to the infirmary.”

She gives the instruction like it will be the hardest thing in the world. There’s no other option that feels safe now. Even if it feels like betraying a friend. 

Ben’s eyes are glazed but she can tell he’s trying to fight it. He’s earned his place here if he’s made it this far. The effort is clearly valiant. He has everything an Alpha needs right there in his arms, he could tear through Rey like paper and run off with Bazine into the night. 

No law would fault him once he broke her skin with his teeth.

She takes a step backwards, up the incline of the hill. It guides Ben to follow her. Both of them carry Bazine as she starts to writhe. 

The next time he stops, sniffing intently, she slaps him. 

Not for herself. But for Bazine.

Ben blinks at her after his head swings back from the blow. His body doesn’t even flinch, Bazine doesn’t move a hair in his grasp, but his head and neck take the hit sharply.

It snaps him out of it. 

She’s lucky, because he could have killed her if he had decided to take Bazine. Rey just directly challenged him again. His choice. He desires. He still can, if he wants to, tear her limb from limb for what he wants. If this is what he wants. 

She assumes whatever obligation keeps him here is the same that has him hum deep in his wordless throat in mere annoyance at  _ her.  _

“Please Ben,” she whispers. 

She watches him grit his jaw, nodding at her gratefully after a moment. He secures Bazine in a safer grip. It’s not fast work, getting her back up the hill. 

It’s not work that eases Rey’s soul. But the scent of Bazine in heat on the main road is too dangerous. 

For this miracle she just had to choose the lesser of two evils to deliver Bazine from. 

* * *

When they near the infirmary, Ben overtakes his hold on Bazine.

Her stomach drops. There’s something about how he gently pushes her away from where she’d been supporting Bazine’s body until she steps back, and watching another Omega reeking of heat tremble softly in his arms. 

Her mouth falls open like she’s been hit in the gut. 

Ben shakes his head at her and points at the infirmary.

Her mind clings to what he might be suggesting.

He can bring Bazine back. It couldn’t be helped now. With her like this, it was the safest place for her for miles. 

But if Rey’s seen, she’d be punished as well. 

Ben capably adjusts Bazine’s weight in his arms and sets a hand on her shoulder. Looking at her. Ignoring the dripping smells of heat all around them. Maybe provoked by them: it’s just the person begging for it isn’t Rey. 

He looks at her like he’s still answering her. 

She swallows and lets out a grunt instead of the answer she intended. Which is strange. She thought she had the words to tell him something. But they were gone. 

Bazine buries her face in Ben’s throat and whines. 

He ignores it: but Rey’s teeth clench. 

He looks at her like he’s going to send her back to the dormitory. He should. She could wash and then get into bed like nothing happened. 

But he doesn’t. Panting from the weight and the trek up the hill, he just keeps staring at Rey like she is an essential part of catching his breath. He’s in bad shape. He wipes his slick-soaked arm under his nose and then wrenches his face away, whining with shame. 

_ Near a rut, _ not that she’s ever been this close to see the signs, but there’s some things that are no mistaking.

Then he holds up one finger. Like someone on the telephone signaling for someone to be quiet. Or to wait.

_ Wait.  _

Rey lets out a deep breath and nods as he shifts Bazine into his arms almost like how he’d hold a child, like a sack of potatoes, like a pile of blankets. 

He keeps his eyes on her until he backs away towards the infirmary. 

What happened this afternoon seems forgotten, or redeemed between them. This is a display of trust. He could drag her off for violating the rules, but he doesn’t. And he is violating the rules by coming back for her, for whatever groan fell from her throat had asked for, and he’s going to do it anyway. 

She’s not sure what it was. Just that she was in pain and it felt like he could fix it.

She assumes the further she is from Bazine, the fainter the residual feelings she picked up will become. 

But now. Left alone in the grass, she feels them much more sharply. 

Her face is flushed against the night air. Every breath drags with a steam to it.

Rey lets out a whimper when he tears away and feels something—

Rey sinks down to her knees in the grass. Her stomach pulses like she can feel her heartbeat between her hip bones. The tight skin of her abdomen is fevered and twitching. Her hands drag over the flesh but in this position, the space between her thighs goes hot and dripping in moments, like a transformation, her back arches and she digs her fingers into the dirt. 

She can’t do anything but wait for Ben.

Something is coming.

* * *

She hears footsteps near the chapel as she lays in the grass. 

Moonlight doesn’t make everything visible, but it leaves a thin ribbon along everything it touches. Blades of grass. Sticks. 

The long lines of Ben’s limbs. 

He’s half-crawling, his back pulsing with tensing muscle. 

Cramps coat the muscles from her knees to her navel. At this point there will only be one relief. She fell like a domino: Bazine’s feelings overwhelming her.

_ Maybe that’s why it’s not smart to house a bunch of Omegas together, no matter how holy.  _

“Alpha,” she tries out the word again, licking her lips as she looks up at him from where she’s hunched over.

_ He came back for her. _

_ He had a writhing, slick Omega in his arms and he came back for her. _

He freezes and she sees his fingers claw the earth in front of him. Like she’s dragging him towards her without even touching him.

Her lips keep forming the motions to beg:

_ “Please.” _

It’s a little whine and it goes through him like a bullet. She shivers at the way it hits with impact, seemingly perceiving him between the shoulders, and makes his whole body take it.

He’s on her like he wants to be buried in her within a moment. His hands tilt her head back by pulling on the hair at the nape of her neck: the sweat and dirt that coats her skin is cleansed by the roll of his tongue across the filth. He’s cleaning her gland. Tending it. 

_ Yes, like this, right in the grass. _

She feels special. She feels  _ different. _ The instinct to preen warms her body, even if she’s just there at the right time of his rut where he can’t resist, and she’s accepting this because her heat ripped out of her so fast from whatever happened with Bazine driving her own biology insane. 

She rises on her knees and nuzzles him back. Warmth slowly travels through her whole body, softening the pain of her heat for a moment into something almost nice.

No, she’s sure of it. If it were her at the bottom of that hill, not Bazine, they would not have made it to the infirmary. They would have fucked out in the moonlight. 

Right now it’s a beautiful thought. 

Still, now they are both coated with another Omega’s slick. It makes her half-crazed, wanting to claw the scent off her skin. That feels dirty and wrong. It offers the perfect contrast to Rey’s own slick, her pure want, muted underneath and probably confusing him. 

She realizes how jealousy truly is a fully-formed sin: how it makes her do things she wouldn’t normally do. She is about to toss her skirt over her head and make him drown over the memories of any other Omega’s scent. 

She has a feeling of exactly what could toss like a wave across her skin to cleanse her. What would come from him.

_ “Ben?” _

It’s not her voice. She almost cries out but Ben covers her mouth with his hand, a strange panic in his eyes. With a low growl, Ben presses Rey down into the grass. When she tries to follow him when he parts from her, he just flattens her gently down again. 

His large hand fanned across her chest. Palm to her sternum. Two fingertips rest of her hammering heart. A command, maybe. A kind of one. 

_ Stay. _

Rey lays perfectly still for a moment and blinks at the sky before she realizes it’s not what she thinks it is. She can move if she wants. She wiggles in a moment of defiance: relieved to feel her body working. But it’s smart to stay hidden. 

Someone’s looking for them.

At the edge of the path to the chapel, the grass has grown long enough to hide her if no one’s looking for her. 

He stands up and into the ray of a flashlight like she isn’t even there.

The old priest appears at the end of the path, having just missed the embrace happening with a design of the devil’s making: an Omega Nun in heat and the Alpha charged to protect her. 

“We need to get you washed off,” Father grunts, approaching fast, “and inside. Now.”

Ben stands there for a moment. 

He has power no one else had at that moment. He’s the Alpha, after all, and all Rey had was what he wanted, which could be taken, and the Father just had...salvation. Which could only be earned one way, it seemed. 

Both men are silent for a moment.

Rey stays silent as well in the brush. Jealous of him. He doesn’t have to answer with an excuse or an apology. His chest heaves enough to tell the priest everything he needs to know. The rut makes him powerful but not controlled, he’s bent at the knees with this sort of strain that he seems too heavy to carry.

There’s a prayer on her lips that he will choose the wrong thing that God can’t answer. Praying for someone to sin for her.

She remembers he’s here for reasons beyond himself, she believes this, as he allows the priest to lead him to the chapel. She keeps her belly to the ground and her cheek against the earth even though her soul is screaming for him. Tremors rack up and down her inner thighs.

A Beta wouldn’t smell her from where she was. But he would be able to hear her cry out in agony as Ben was led away by the collar if she did as she so wanted to.

Her Alpha was being taken away. 

She suffers in silence until the doors to the chapel close. 

There is so much pain until she realizes that she is safe. He hid her so she wouldn’t be taken away like he was just now. Like how Bazine was put away in the infirmary.

Her fingers knot into the blades of grass underneath her.

She knows what’s coming. 

And she knows what she needs. 

* * *

The smell is the first thing she has to deal with. 

It’s not like he’ll want her less with the fertile odor of two Omegas on her skin. He might even like that, like he’s claiming two at once. There’s something instinctual to it that she feels he’d react to. 

It’s just that she doesn’t want him to want her more for not coming to him purely as herself. 

He will not be giving her a confused muddle of two things he could want or she’d never be able to bear it. This is painful, but something instinctual makes her bathe before going to him.

It’s torture to wash herself in the dormitory showers. She covers her mouth to hide the sobs that keep falling. It’s the middle of the night and she prays no one investigates the lone light left on in the window. It’s not impossible for a girl to be in the lavatory in the middle of the night: but it’s still something a Superior would stick her nose in. 

Her bathing is quick for that reason, scrubbing roughly to remove any foreign scent until her skin is red and raw. Her whole body shudders in the waves of contractions at her cervix, pulsing like it’s freshly bruised. Cramps quake up her belly and down her legs. The heat of the steam helps slightly with the pain, for once warm because of the late hour. 

It’s all she can do to just numb her own mind to be able to complete this task. Once she’s clean and only smells of soap and her own slick,  _ herself again, _ she’s able to dress in her black clothes to the best of her ability and stuff her wet hair back under her veil. 

The strangeness tonight can at least be enough reason to be out of bed, if she gets caught. She smelled something. Bazine, to her knowledge, is not in her room. She heard a noise.

There’s no trepidation when she leaves the building the second time tonight.

She runs to the chapel with no fear of getting caught. 

Ben himself seems to have been similarly washed: perhaps with a hand containing more ferocity. He’s clean, as are his clothes fresh, but that’s not what Rey sees immediately. 

He’s tied to the massive cross that’s soldered to the wall. 

His position is not as christlike. He’s on his knees like a sinner, not a savior, and the size of the crucifix would never hold a body like his aloft so the drape of his arms is different, more defeated, if that’s possible. 

It’s just enough to bind his wrists to keep him from going anywhere. Even if he can’t move, he’s not bound enough to keep the smell of him from filling the entire chapel. 

When he would rut, they left him here. 

Tied. Raging. Alone. 

Rey goes to him slowly but steadily. The fact that he’s tied frightens her. Or maybe the fact that she has to watch him fight it with such power that there’s no telling what happens when he’s free. 

_ This is to keep us safe, _ the last grasp of her sanity tells her.

Her abdomen pulses as she watches him struggle against chains to reach for her.

She doesn’t want to be safe. 

Rey goes to him in the uniform that represents all the vows she’s supposed to take. Everything he’s supposed to protect. That’s all forgotten now telling by the look on his face. 

He hasn’t smelled her tonight since the scents were a mixture on her skin. Now it’s all her own. When she approaches him, his spot with his knees on the stone floor brings his head to her hips. 

She knew what she came here to do. She wears her uniform: but there’s nothing underneath.

She lifts her skirt for him to see if this is what he wants. Suddenly shy, she attempts a step back when she is bared above her stockings for him. She’s acted too rashly, gotten too close—

His teeth latch to her inner thigh to keep her from moving away from him, a patch of bare skin coated in her slick, and suddenly it’s inside his mouth. She feels his groan from her leg to her tummy to her shoulders, even tightening the skin of her scalp with a pleasured shiver. 

She can’t get far from his teeth. His tongue circles the little part of her he can actually hold onto with his hands still bound. 

It might hurt to pull away, but she still can if she wants to. She just chooses not to, pressing closer instead. Relieved that she’ll stay put, his teeth leave her skin and he mouths much more gently wherever he can touch. Roaming. Rumbling. 

She tilts her chin back as he mouths at her and her nails go into his arms like claws. 

“Did Bazine smell good for you?”

She doesn’t know why she says it. Other than the cruelest instinct inside herself that she can’t control. All of her kindness, all of her capacity for friendship, it vanishes like mist and she is just pure steel inside.  _ Eliminate your rival.  _

It was like in the woods when Bazine ran. Omegas stayed together to protect each other unless there was an Alpha involved. 

Ben is breathing her scent heavily, eyes fluttered back. He shakes his head. His chest puffs with every inhalation. Then she lets him lean forward, her hands on his chin, until his chin is almost too close to hold against her. 

He licks her. A flat tongue nudging her cunt, parting her lips, seeking fresh slick. It bursts out of her at his touch, embarrassingly fast, and she quivers with shame. Her body  _ is _ sinful. She has a devout man flicking her clit with his tongue at the base of a crucifix. 

She can’t help but shiver at the look on his face. So often she’s seen him bowed in prayer like he needed it. Salvation. He was so good. 

Something evil inside her does this. Enjoy how different he looks now. Dark. Seductive. 

Through this she has changed him more than she has changed herself. 

Rey’s legs shake as he groans at her taste. His tongue keeps flicking against her cunt like he is gulping her down. She looks at the way his eyes flutter shut: deadened with pleasure. 

A groan falls from his lips as she pulls away because she’s scared he forgot to breathe. 

Ben yanks against his bonds once more as Rey stumbles back. But she’s too fast for his teeth this time.

She gasps in surprise at the feeling she can only process once ended. With shaking hands, she takes off her wimple and drops it on the floor, her wet hair clinging to her neck.

His shoulders twist unnaturally as he strains to reach for her. He can’t; he looks like he’s going to pop an arm out of its socket. 

Rey hurries to fall to her knees in front of him and urge him back against the cross. 

“Ben,” she touches the back of his head and neck protectively. Holding him. He’d break his own body before he broke that cross to get to her. “Please don’t hurt yourself.”

A hiss of his breath warms her shoulder. 

He’ll do it, too.

The feverish burn in her abdomen starts to broil. She presses more insistently into him but he can’t do anything for her like this. He tries. Shoving his hips into her belly, kissing her swollen gland insistently. 

“If I untie you,” she says, out of breath, and even more lost for words when he clamps his teeth down on her shoulder to prevent from claiming her at the offer. “Will you—help me?”

It’s beyond asking for help. It’s not their choice. 

If she unties him, it will happen.

He grinds frantically against her, nodding, promising. 

Her body moves without her permission, drawing her thigh up around his hip.

Her hands lack all deftness but she manages to unknot the rope around his wrists at the base of the cross and then he goes _ wild.  _

It feels like he throws her across the room: but he only presses her to the floor, and maybe then some with the strength of his body. It takes no time at all. One moment she’s standing and the next she just feels solid stone under her hip and shoulder. 

All the air leaves her lungs in a helpless squeak.

Ben goes down with her, tangled in her limbs, holding her open, snapping his jaws next to her ear as he drops them in an efficient heap on the floor.

He doesn’t bite yet. But it all happens so fast that everything about her could be changed in those seconds. She put her fate in his hands.

Her uniform is up around her waist and he presses inside her cunt in one fluid motion: his freedom seems to hinge on this more than the act of untying him. The tip of his cock forces out more of her slick, in the single instant it takes from that first nudge to him deeply seated inside there’s an embarrassing splash of the displaced fluid that coats both their thighs. 

For the stupidest decision of their lives: making it is over quickly. Then it’s made.

They both let out noises from deep in their throats. Mirrors of each other. Arched necks, twisting limbs, empty lungs. His hips nudge into hers when he’s seated, like he can push that much further into her cunt, and Rey presses back with her blank eyes fluttering, like she is also looking to fill any room she has left to take him. Which feels impossible. He’s taken every inch she has to give.

They still try.

“Oh,” Rey says after a moment of them pushing their hips together on the floor. She had been warned of pain for this: but after over an hour of horrific cramping it is like the twist of muscle inside her has gone completely slack around her Alpha’s cock. 

It’s just relief.

Her hands wander under the skirt thrown up around her waist. She curiously presses her palms to her stomach. There’s an imprint, a foreign shape, that her hands nudge up against that presses out from the inside. 

Ben keens at the touch. 

He can feel himself in her belly. 

She smiles for a minute and strokes her fingers over the bump, down the outline of where the head of his cock would be. He tenses over her, hissing through his teeth, but when he timidly opens his eyes at her as her finger swirls, the moment turns surprisingly tender between them. He bites his pretty lips and breathes carefully through his nose as she plays where they can feel him through her flesh. 

She looks up at him through her lashes. 

She knows it’s early in her heat, and that his rut will get more intense as she falls further away from this clarity. But she really thought this moment would be crude debasement. A loss of self. A lot of growling and panting and animalistic lust. The thing that took people away from their beliefs, from their inner thoughts. As if these decisions were made in removing oneself from who they were, all they had been taught, and what of it they had truly learned. 

This moment is quiet with Ben inside her. Despite the rut. Despite the heat. 

She was always taught someday an alpha would show up and ruin her. But she’s never felt closer to someone else.

_ You and me. Your body in my body. _

What she was warned of seemed like a total loss of self. Both of them blushing, eyes wide and curious, blinking and swallowing and shivering as they both had their thoughts and their knowledge and exactly who they were meeting together at this moment. It was so much harder to hide.

His face is twisted with restraint. Even inside of her. Something seems to be _ different  _ inside of her. She’s occupied. It is done. 

She’s not a virgin any longer.

He seems to hold himself like there’s something left for him to do. Something more. 

All at once she remembers his rut. What it does to an Alpha’s body. The sweat that coats his face and the flush on his skin all signs that he is not finished with whatever it is. 

An uneasy feeling settles under her uterus as well. 

She needs more, too. Better let him do as he pleases.

Rey licks her lips and shivers, letting her body go lax against the stone floor with his cock staking into her. A sigh flutters out of her mouth like a little moth.

Ben stills for a minute and cradles the backs of her forearms in his hands, his hips swaying against her but seemingly examining her to re-adjust himself if needed. She just stares up at him as he looks down at her. Maybe he can observe something greater about this feeling, this moment, but all she can do is feel it as it happens. 

Her eyes flutter shut when his hips pulse back and forth. 

Feeling bliss. 

“Give it to me,” she whispers.

The efficient creature she knows returns at this order. 

Ben wraps his arms around her and lifts her off the floor into his lap. She cries out when he impales her down on his cock, but it’s a good cry, a half-laugh and a shout, like what falls joyfully out of her throat when she gets caught outside in a rainstorm. Her thighs tense around his hips as he pistons himself inside her. Slick spills down his thighs and she holds on to him, no friction between their bodies to be had, for dear life.

Both of them were meant to live without this. All this wasted energy. Wasted bodies. 

She could have died without this. Even if it kills her now, the life slowly unwinding down the other path, the righteous one, feels more like doom than this. Her Alpha’s heart beats wildly against her chest as he fucks her, keeping his arms around her like she’s too good for the floor. 

Rey rolls her hips greedily into his lap. When he leans back, they knock into the massive crucifix he was tied to. Rey clings to the post making the base of it for leverage. Her rocking is now guided and they both groan at the change.

Due to the timing, she can now see her change in perception of her heat. What’s the worst of it will come  _ later,  _ something she could not appreciate when she just wanted Ben as soon as possible _. _ She’s not thinking too hard about it  _ now. _ Not with Ben bouncing her on his cock. Getting everything she needs. Snuggling her head under his chin and kissing his throat. She doesn’t really care what comes next.

Until she thinks she hears something in the distance. 

Her hands grip his shoulders while she blurrily tries to imagine a world outside of this.

_ “Ben.” _

She tries to still him for a listen: but he’s too far gone. He flips them, lying on his back with Rey a mess in his lap. She swings her own hips at the adjustment, a moan falling from her lips, but her heart is racing because she vaguely senses someone approaching.

Ben holds the nape of her neck in his hands and groans, his hips stuttering up into hers. It’s jerky and a little frantic, his thrusts making her have to move on him like she’s trying to stay on top of a bull.

It takes a moment for her to realize the meaning for the readjustment. To take his weight off of her for the time they’ll be locked in a knot. From the look on his face: very soon. 

Her head raises, alert, a strange instinct that comes with the lack of a nest surrounding them. This is such an open location. She should have built a nest, somewhere safe, but it’s too late. 

Rey tries to lift herself off for a moment to investigate the sound, but she feels something inside her burst into flame. There’s a moment of sharp pain, like a bee sting, and she falls forward against his body in shock when she realizes the flash of heat against her cervix is Ben’s knot trapped in her cunt. 

She’s not going anywhere for a while. 

The impact of the initial force of his knot wanes and pulses into a slick warmth. His cum is bathing her walls in soothing murmurs. 

She closes her eyes, breath returning in short gasps. 

Being stuck like this isn’t bad at all. Not with him cradling her and nuzzling her throat. She tries to wiggle for a little relief of the pressure, but one tug has him groaning with his head thrown back, seemingly in pain. 

“Sorry,” she hisses, but he shakes his head and strokes her shoulders.

He guides her down to snuggle under his chin. It’s calm for a moment. Locked together. One, almost as it it’s intended to be this way.

Both of them shifting like they’re tucking into bed, because it will be a while until—

Until the footsteps on stone grow too near to be ignored and just like that they’re discovered. 

“You didn’t.”

Rey flinches with a squeak and tries to pull herself off the knot. Her thighs scramble to try and escape, but she’s held open by her own weight on top of him. Ben gives a sound of genuine pain and grasps her tighter, holding her still and splayed on top of him, even obscured in the darkness the candles light enough for the priest to lay eyes on the position they’re locked in. 

There is no room for error, even as Rey protests in the back of her throat, squirming feebly on the knot that isn’t leaving her body unless by grace of God.

Grace that seems to have escaped them, being caught like this and all. 

Ben’s splayed hands travel up her back and press Rey as close to his chest as possible. It’s firm so she doesn’t hurt either of them. But also protective. 

This way, she can hide her face in his throat. 

The footsteps round a path near their joined bodies. Rey wants to cover herself desperately, and faintly feels Ben adjusting her skirts to cover her where they’re joined. 

A little modesty for the whore.

“I’d really expected better from you, Ben.”

Nothing is said to Rey. She bites her lips and hot tears squeeze out of her eyes. They drip onto Ben’s throat, which is tensed like he’s about to howl. She stares at the shadowed chords up the column of his throat. Working. Trying. Nothing will come out. 

When another step gets too close to them, he draws them both back together a few inches across the floor, their hips still flush against each other, but the slight motion is heavy enough to bruise them both. 

Rey lets out a near-unhinged whine. Not because it hurts. Even now streams of cum gently flood her walls. It’s warm, and she feels so soft and open inside, and he’s there.

Her connection to this Alpha has her moaning in pleasure in front of her  _ priest. _ She’s just relieved she can’t see his face: how it must look to see them so far gone like this.

She feels when he inches them over to a stone wall, his back resting against it so she can lean against him until this is over. There’s a slight comfort from being in his lap.

There’s something about how he ruts into her cunt even as his priest watches that shows that there is no stopping this. Not with a God, not with chains, not with a bullet. 

_ Alpha is choosing you. _

There is a grunt that comes out of her alpha as a threat so low and angry that it’s clear: they’re not going anywhere until this knot goes down. Until he’s emptied himself inside her. Even like this, she’s sure he’d kill to keep them together. 

She takes a deep breath and lets herself feel safe until that time they have to part from each other. 

_ But then what? _

* * *

The girls in the dormitory blink awake when the hall lights all turn abruptly on. 

After the knot has softened enough to free her: Rey is given twenty minutes to pack all her things. 

Her sweaty hair falls around her neck as she clutches the bundle of her wimple and stockings to her chest. 

It’s almost as if she doesn’t need to look at a clock because every moment away from Ben pulses in the core of her body. It’s sustaining torture just to take each step as each second ticks by. 

The other sisters cluster at the doors of their rooms and rustle the night with whispers as they try to figure out what’s happening. Whatever it is, it clearly couldn’t wait until morning. 

The nuns didn’t necessarily  _ need _ to make this much of a display of Rey being cast out: yet in many ways, they do. 

Rey can feel herself become an example as she walks into the room she shared with Bazine. Bazine isn’t even there to know she’ll be gone before it happens. 

Silently, resenting the supervising Superior watching her closely from the doorway and the whispers tossing across the hallway, she gathers her meager possessions and throws them all into her battered suitcase. She’s dizzy from Ben’s hands, dizzy without Ben’s hands, and in the wake between one roiling wave of her heat she can only think about when she’s back safely in his arms.

Her heat has waned for now, with little drips of Ben slithering down her bare thighs, but it’ll come back. She may be on her own when it comes back. She may be in the middle of nowhere, reeking of this, and utterly doomed. At this point she can feel her pulse in her temple and cheeks, like a migraine while being choked. It’s feverish and painful and against her biology, but the Superiors watching her pack didn’t care much for her biology to begin with. 

She wants to turn around and ask why keep an Alpha here and not let everyone have a turn with him: as she had felt much better.

This time is usually meant for her to cuddle and nap with her mate. Completely safe. Cared for. Seen to. Her eyes are bloodshot and her skin is coated with sickly sweat because it feels wrong to be doing this when Ben waits in Holdo’s office while she packs.

_ This _ is meant to humiliate and insult. It would take anyone else longer than twenty minutes to pack. They’d rush. They’d have the capacity to feel humiliated and shunned. 

She’s beyond that.

Rey doesn’t even need half that time to gather herself up in a bag anyway. 

* * *

“You will be held responsible for this.”

Rey blinks in shock for a moment. She was willing to take responsibility for this stupid mistake. In the blindness of heat, she was careless about it. 

And her thighs are starting to cramp up for the next wave, so there’s not much in her heart left for caring.

But Holdo directly addresses Ben. Not Rey. 

Like she is not someone capable of choice. 

He doesn’t even flinch, dropping his chin into his hand and nodding boredly. His attention isn’t fully on what’s happening in this room, or at least what they’re in this office to do with Rey’s packed bag at her side and him folded in a little chair that’s too small for him. Every so often Rey lets out a pained sound as the next wave of her heat racks closer and his whole body tenses: completely alert to those cues.

Rey forces her attention to the matter at hand so Ben doesn’t shove her to the floor at the sign of her asking. She can smell her Alpha and it’s comfortingly close. Not enough, but something. She focuses on the scent of his body as it moves.

The Superior General of the convent’s eyes are so icy. She always had a softness in dealing with her girls. Rey realizes now that she is not one of Holdo’s girls anymore.

“And if either of you are to remain here, you’ll have to be married.”

Rey lets her breath leave her body in a little squeak. 

It’s clear they are not given a choice: she knew she’d be expelled from the order if she was discovered. But  _ married? _ They could do that?

Her eyes grow dull when she thinks over her other options. She’s not mated, but  _ claimed, _ no longer sacred in the eyes of the Church. Their protection doesn’t extend to her. Neither, it hits her with a pang, does Ben’s. 

If she doesn’t marry him, then she really has nowhere to go.

She glances at him to see if her mortification is shared. To finally be plunged into nothing, even without shelter she can perhaps make her escape, find another life—

Rey feels a particularly nasty cramp and her head falls back in pain for a moment. 

This was thought to be suffering for God. This pain. From how she felt writhing on the chapel floor, to how her body bore it again and again. Why did she have to suffer? What had she  _ done? _

You have to be sorry for the things you’ve done. But if you suffer anyway, weren’t her actions understandable?

She sniffles at the weight of her choices from here, one choice that can only be made if it matches Ben’s. Already she imagines what the road looks like at this time of night, hitchhiking with her suitcase, praying whoever picks her up isn’t the last person who sees her alive. 

It is too much to even look at him until from the seat next to her he gently takes her hand. Then she nervously lifts her eyes to him.

Ben does not look at all miserable with this turn of events. He takes a moment, seemingly of consideration, and after a pause he nods.

Rey blinks from him to Holdo, almost as a last resort to beg Holdo for her protection. 

The look that returns to her is not forgiving.

Rey swallows and faces the Alpha who will be her husband.

He’s smiling at her.

She’s so taken aback by it at first because she’s never seen Ben smile before. It should make her happy, but it just makes her feel cold.

This unlikely turn of events has him  _ beaming _ at her.

  
  


* * *

Ben carries her all the way to his cabin. 

She can still walk, and must be as easy to carry in one piece as a nest of snakes from the way her heat has her writhing, but he’s harder to fight on this issue than she is. She tries not to wince when he kicks the door open without setting her down. This is all so surreal that the bugs whirring around the lights evoke envy from her. The way they vanish into the night when frightened.

He doesn’t set her down for a moment: which she vaguely knows is appropriate. She’s a bride. 

They were married in record time in the same chapel they shared for an hour of her heat. They didn’t have much time until she was back in a similar state: Rey was glad she didn’t use all of her twenty minutes to pack. 

If she had use of her senses, she’d realize the priest that married them had witnessed the consummation before the vows. But she was too busy looking at Ben when asked if he will take her. 

For some reason she pictured a voice coming from that focused, pursed mouth, giving his answer.

He simply nodded.

She’s a wife. 

It doesn’t set in just yet, because her body has needs that are becoming more pressing each moment. He seems to know this. He doesn’t carry her through his small lodgings to give her the tour, nor does he rush her to his bed from his own eagerness. The minute she’s down, she puts her arms around his neck to pull him down on the mattress with her. 

He is holding her down and fucking her within minutes.

Her heart makes it so they don’t have to talk. Don’t have to think. Or maybe the marriage does. Ben spans her hips with his hands and raises them up, pushes them back, bounces them in his lap. 

It goes on for hours. She’s never been this close to another person in complete silence, awake, and in their own way, working together. 

His knot doesn’t hurt at all anymore. It’s a pleasant, warm feeling, especially safe in a bed where they won’t be disturbed. She comes to long for the hot lash of it striking inside her. She discovers that she was so early in her heat when she first took it that her body hadn’t been ready to receive it. When she tenses up during that first numb, confused, wired night as his wife, she realizes how yielding her body grows to the knot, loving the feeling of it filling her cunt so snugly. 

They both seem relieved by this, that she’s not scared of it, and demands it more and more as her state heightens. 

At least they will be absent for a few days to clear up the mess of questions all the remaining Sisters would have at Rey’s expulsion and the sounds coming from the woods. 

* * *

He goes to get them food. 

She knows he has to. It's maybe been days. Feels like weeks. And that he’s given her everything she needs when she wants it, ever since they were married a few hours ago. 

But still, she’s listless as he moves about the kitchen. He didn’t bother turning the light on in this bedroom. The kitchen light roams in through the doorway from down the hall.

This is perhaps the first moment of waning in hours. Where it’s not a clash of their teeth, hands, bodies. 

He hasn’t mated her yet. Her shaky hand plucks at her unbitten throat. 

Not yet. 

Rey lies back in bed with a sigh. Other than his creaky, soft footsteps as he pads around securing them food, it’s going to be a quiet marriage. 

A grunt leaves her throat and her face scrunches up, trying to picture the alternative. Where she’d be now. 

It's hard to hide from why she feels so _stupid._ All she'd needed to do was stay in bed. It’s a lot simpler to just follow rules for people who have nowhere else to go.

She twists away to face the wall so when Ben comes back he won’t wonder what she’s thinking. It’s not as concrete as regret: but it’s something of a cousin of it. Even fleeting, he doesn't need to see it now.

Her eye catches something.

There’s a scrap of white fabric tucked between the bed and the wall. Stained, dirty. Limp as if molded to warm skin.

Her nose wrinkles and she groans when she pulls it up into her hands. 

A pillowcase, like the one taken from her. Like the one she saw him hunched over a few weeks ago. The ritual of the new girl. The last thing she ever wanted to find in her marriage bed, the scented pillowcase of another Omega—

The smell that crosses her nose knocks her onto her back on the mattress. She grips the material in her fist and brings it to her nose again searchingly. 

It’s not the new girl’s scent,  _ any new girl’s, _ that he kept in his bed. Using it to debase himself over and over until he reached the point of cool indifference to the real, living Omega.

The scent he kept in his bed for that purpose was hers. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapel scene was edited with WAP blasting go in peace and serve the Lord Amen.
> 
> Also! I learned something on Twitter this week that I hope I can share here: always use slashes when you write A/B/O because without slashes it means something else!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just some content warnings: Rey is adjusting to daily life with Ben with no education on the subject of muteness: which is the purpose of the existing ‘ableism’ tag. Chapter 4 deals more directly with these assumptions and both of them working on communication as was initially planned to be in today's update. It was going to be too long to cover here without like a 20k word chapter, which is why I just split it down the middle. But it is coming!
> 
> There’s also a fake out twist that is not actually a twist but looks like a twist, bear with me, it’s all clarified in this chapter. 
> 
> There’s mating bites so a little blood and, uh, mating bites.
> 
> Rey performs some dirty-talk to make a good Catholic boy blush, which actually goes harder than any dirty-talk I have ever written, so the term “whore” gets thrown around pretty liberally. 

Rey has a husband. 

She thinks about this sometimes as she stares at the lump beside her in bed in the mornings. 

When she can. She’s not usually allowed the vantage point.

He holds her very tightly in bed. Too tightly to be able to look at him with any distance preserving the ability to properly see. 

She wonders if he means to. She can tell it’s something that happens as he sleeps. They don’t fall asleep in these interlocked positions. And from the way he seems to want to absorb her smell, it’s not entirely on purpose that it happens.

It’s probably because the scent that fills his bed is an unmated Omega. 

Rey didn’t realize this distinction in their marriage at first.

Her heat still lingered, achy and pained, for the first few days. They fucked throughout it. Her moans tossed out as far as the porch, like his had when he debased himself to her scent—

It was always her scent. She can tell by the smell of the room. 

—and he kept her well taken care of. The ceremony that had bound them for life had barely interrupted her deep pangs of longing. She’d had more time to pack up her things to carry for the sad walk to his home than it took to marry them. 

So at first the honeymoon is melded in heat until there was no distinction between the two. They don’t have to talk: she just grabs for him in her sleep and they join together like puzzle pieces. She can’t even manage to feel guilt for the first few days. Her purity and her options gone in one fell swoop. 

She can’t care.

Not with him rocking into her, filling her with a perfect knot, grunting quietly in her ear.

When that time passes, she can sometimes wake up and examine his sleeping face, his hair, his arms. In small pieces, never the whole picture at once, because that would involve wrestling out of his hold on her, a feat she can’t accomplish even with him unconscious.

Their marriage doesn’t start on the foot of getting to know each other very well. Their bodies didn’t allow for it at first, her heat dictating every need to meet. 

And yet there are moments—

—Just moments—

Where it feels more affectionate than that. On the third day he goes to get her food from his small kitchen, when it wanes enough for her to let him leave, and she creeps to the end of the bed to follow him. He is already walking around shamelessly naked, it makes her feel less strange about all this, if he can do that without shame. When her feet touch the floor, he sees her get out of his bed and pounces on her, pinning her, nuzzling and kissing her neck until she relents, then relaxes. 

His order, amongst the soft touches, to stay put is clear. 

She’ll obey it, for now. From all the fuzzy feelings she’s having in her breast to know he intends to handle it. 

Then he pads to the kitchen again with all of his clothes off and she lies in the bed they have warmed for days. 

That’s a moment where it’s very nice to have a husband, at first.

* * *

It ends with her heat, in a way. Or began. Or doomed itself. 

They were in bed for days without a care of what it was they were doing. Instincts draw that out of bodies, and souls from minds. They were married but may as well have been damned and too far down that road to know where they veered off it. 

It’s not like it was a sin to make love to her husband. But he was her husband before she knew what it would be like to make love to him, and they were knotted in a rutted heat before they were married. It was complicated.

But complicated enough to hide behind for the first few, sweaty days. 

Then she feels it tossing in her limbs on the last day. His body moving slower over hers. Focusing. Un-blinded. Her breasts tender against his skin, her body arching up to rub them against his chest.

Her voice falls out in a steady stream as he fills her so tight: not with a knot. But just the cock of the man she married. 

_ Ben. Ben. Ben.  _

He likes it, there’s a tranquility across his features but pure fire in his eyes when she cuddles her body into his, folded over hers and rocking between her legs, and says his name like it’s the only thing she can remember. 

It would make the lack of touch she would face in the future make more sense if this was not a part of it. This tenderness. Belonging to each other. Him being a husband, not an unfortunate soul that got caught by the scent of her heat. 

She brings his hand to her breast, which is tender from all the sucking and biting that happened during her heat, and breathes out as he cups it in his hand, drawing her nipple against his rough palm. Ben moans and places a kiss on her mouth, hanging open with slow, steamed breaths, his cock sliding into her with the smooth, steady pace of a rocking chair.

If he was who he was before he became Ben. Just an Alpha. She twists her fingers in his sweaty hair and pleads in a high voice—

—something deep _ breaks— _

—and she’s crumbling like ancient stone into dust in his hands. 

There’s a difference between the pleasure around a knot and  _ this. _ She learns the distinction between that and orgasm all at once. This unroots her. She arches and cries and twists. He keeps her steady through it as she babbles his name. 

He rests his tired head to her breast and laps at her nipple with his tongue while she cums. It’s quieter than the throws of her heat, softer than the aggression of his rut. They’re oddly..themselves, again. 

She’s his wife, this is the least sinful thing they have done at the end of this long list of days, and still it’s like they regret it when it’s over. He makes love to her. That's something different that can't be taken back.

It feels wrong.

It’s over because they can even stop when they want, they _ can, _ and when it stops it’s like the rest of the world died first before them and the room rings with silence and then—

In the distance, the bells for Mass ring from the chapel. 

* * *

_ Married but unmated _ weighs heavy on her shoulders. 

Rey blushes as she tosses their dirty, heat-scented sheets into the basket the clean linens arrived in. Ben will drop them by the main building in the afternoon: as he’s still employed by the convent. She wonders if the girls on laundry will smell it on them. 

She wonders about the white pillowcase on top of the clean ones, the extra, that reeked of another Omega. Another new girl.

It didn’t matter now. She was his. Wasn’t she?

Even if she wasn’t mated.

It’s a wonder how this will work. She can remember scraps of the conversation in Holdo’s office, but it was at a point where her belly was coiling like a nest of snakes and could only be calmed one way. 

Conversation. As if it weren’t just Holdo speaking until the priest arrived with everything prepared for a wedding mass. One party unable to speak and the other unwanted. 

_ “We’ve never had a mated caretaker. Perhaps that would have been...for the best. But not from one of our girls.” _

She cups her throat in her hand. Palm to the flush of her unscarred gland. 

They have been married for weeks and he hasn’t mated her. 

She fills her days in close proximity to the house. Sometimes she goes into what parts of the woods still feel like a part of the cabin: a creek, a clearing, a thicket of mulberry bushes that she gathers from and stocks the kitchen with bowls and bowls of them. Too many to possibly eat, but Ben smiles at her kindly when he sees she’s gathered them and tries to consume as many as possible to indulge her. 

Every time she sets a bowl out next to the still half-full one from the day beside it, she closes her eyes and tries not to cry that her day is reduced to  _ this.  _ Lying about. Resting in the sun. Waiting for him to come back just for something to focus on. 

Because there’s nice things. 

Sleeping beside him is nice. They don’t have to talk for that. He cuddles her close and feeling him breathe is strangely thrilling. Touching him. Oddly solid. He’s her husband. He’s hers. 

She’s never had anything of her own. 

Getting to have mornings in peace where she focuses on the dappled freckles that cover his skin is more than a nun every thought she’d get. 

Any context to her new place here is lost with Ben as the carrier. He can’t explain to her what her new role is. She’d have to seek out Holdo, the rest of the Superiors, and even then it was not like they were in charge of her anymore. They’d want her confused and rudderless. She hasn’t taken their guidance once. Why would they offer it now that she’s failed them. The convent employed Ben, but only from Rey’s assumptions could she surmise he was too difficult to replace, and perhaps even less trouble for them now with an Omega wife to take the brunt of his instincts.

When he comes home, dirt on his hands, a tired slouch to his shoulders, she wordlessly hands him the new Omega’s pillowcase.

He takes it from her with a wince. There’s a moment where she wonders if he’ll take it into the bedroom like he did hers. But he doesn’t. 

He settles at the kitchen table like this is quite normal, wrapping the case around his fist like a gauntlet, and takes a few cautious sniffs. He eats dinner with it there. The scent drifting around them.

At least he’s not trying to sneak anything. But it drives her crazy. The smell. The idea of someone slipping in to take his attention. That if she weren’t here, who was to say he wouldn’t replace the pillowcase she’d shoved under the bed like she’d never found it with this new one. 

She puzzles at him the whole meal. Her fork is about to bend in her grip. Fresh scent surrounding them. 

No apparent curiosity. 

He’s not...aroused. 

Not like the way that she knew he was with hers. 

And yet, Rey is not his mate.

Rey doesn’t relax until Ben, apparently used to the scent, tosses it aside like a dirty napkin into the dirty laundry. Not nearly as thoroughly used as her...sample.

She should have nothing to be afraid of. He’s married her. Just without...completing the deal, between Alpha and Omega. 

And he hasn’t had sex with her since her heat. 

* * *

  
  


Eventually the mulberries are too overripe to pick. 

She putters around the house instead of gathering, looking for a project while Ben works around the convent during the day. But she’s never had a home of her own to know how to make it nice. Each corner and eave she assesses seems to be holding up just fine by the bachelor formerly in charge of them. 

She finds one thing that is not as it is meant to be, not neglected by carelessness, but by lack of necessity. 

Behind the cabin is a dirt bed left to waste with weeds, a former garden, a plot that still looked solid enough to plant from.

But it seemed a little nice, to have something in their yard that they didn’t get from a pack of nosy nuns. To yield something his job wasn’t providing them. It’s one of those snap decisions made in boredom that becomes the entire focus of her world. 

What else is she to do with her baffling new life?

Rey takes her first trip back to the main grounds to the library in search of some books on gardening. There’s an embarrassingly long struggle for what to wear to accomplish this task: the ratty flowered dress she wore when she arrived here, which would be noticed immediately in a sea of black, or the uniform that would blend in that she wore her last night as a novice. 

That she has no right to wear: and can’t even bear the thought of being caught dead in it. 

With a grimace she gingerly slips into her thin, faded dress, and luckily by the time she reaches the library she finds it’s pretty dead. 

Except for Rose at the desk. 

Rose blinks at her like she’s surprised Rey is even alive.

“Hello.”

No  _ congratulations, _ which probably would have made Rey cry to hear anyway. 

She’s close to tears just to see a friendly face after her heat, and then hiding out in Ben’s cottage for a week afterwards not knowing what to do with herself. 

And it’s wonderful to hear another person’s voice. 

“Hi,” Rey creeps quietly to the desk and grabs Rose’s hands. 

She feels it when their skin touches. A flash of bitterness, resentment, jealousy. Rose never directed those feelings at her before. She blinks because Rose’s face is so calm, so kind. 

“How has it been?”

And Rose’s voice cares to know. Maybe the bitterness was just imagined, but Rey almost can’t relax her shoulders or drop her stupid smile. 

“Um. You know. _ Quiet,” _ she answers lamely with a shaky laugh. “It happened very fast, as I’m sure you know. My heat came too soon, it triggered a rut…”

She waves her hand like  _ one-thing-led-to-another _

“...so now I’m married.”

Rose blinks at her. Like it’s barely a story. A comment. A trifle. 

Rey swallows and shifts uneasily. She has tried, since being married to the man, to forget about the note she saw. But telling by Rose’s reaction—

“Do you know...anything about Ben...that you can tell me?”

Rose’s brow furrows for a second. Taken aback.

“I really don’t know Ben. He’s always been around. He's nice. I just didn’t know—” she shivers with her elbows braced on the desk, “—I guess the idea of him coveting one of us just makes me feel... _ uneasy.” _

_ “Covet” _ is not a word Rey wants to think about either. But it also confuses her. She’d chalk Rose’s reaction up to jealousy by the time she went home if it were not for this discomfort. 

And that accusation of coveting the girls made her raise her hackles more than a little bit.

“You two don’t interact at all?”

Rose narrows her eyes.

“Can’t say we do.”

“Because—”

And then Rey just stops. Why should she say it? It’s not like anyone told her a damn thing about Ben, or how easy it was to fall, or what her new place in this world is. Why even bother with whatever chip on her shoulder Rose has, or what a note meant to a man who had married her, and never tried to sneak another Omega for himself before her.

_ Unmated.  _ It clangs in her head like a funeral bell. Unmated.

Rose is clearly baffled, one brow raised in a sort of defensive suspicion. At least it means the notes meant something. 

Great. More secrets. More answers she’ll have to find out on her own.

But for now someone else can wonder what other people know. Rey turns on her heel to find her books.

There’s someone folded up near a corner of the shelves, reading on the floor, massive limbs all folded up. She hadn’t noticed anyone else in the library. 

Her heart warms for a moment, even without her meaning it to, just to see  _ him _ there. 

Her husband is seated on the floor with his knees bent, a book in his hands and his head tilted in focus. He chews his thumbnail as he reads. 

It’s the stillest she’s ever seen him. Not the quietest: but there’s a lot of tough competition for that distinction. 

Instantly her brain contradicts that with a few weeks worth of discovery.

He hums when he looks for something in the kitchen cupboards. He groans when he wakes up and notices all of her weight on him that he gathered up in his arms and piled onto himself in the night. There's something soft that comes out when he's relaxing in a hot bath that makes her have to go out to the porch to get some air. During some dreams, he whimpers.

It's not the quiet but the stillness or her husband right now that are so unnerving. Utterly silent like right now is actually a rare form for Ben, which is why she can't help but tease him a little.

She softens her steps and crouches low to approach him. He’s so focused, or merely used to her scent at home, that he doesn’t notice her until she squats at his feet. 

“Excuse me sir,” she folds her hands neatly on his bent knee. Ben flinches and looks up at her with wide, surprised eyes, “this is a library. If you can't behave I'll have to ask you to leave.”

Ben’s brow knits up for a second as he stares at her. 

Then he smiles. His nostrils flare for a second in a breathy laugh.

He closes his book instead of hiding behind it. Then carefully places the book beside him and leans his head back against the shelf. Just looking at her. It’s more normal than any moment that has passed between them. He puts his hands up after a second, palms out and chastised, and then brings a promising finger to his lips.

_ I’ll be quiet. _

She bites back a smile. She never pictured Ben as bad-natured, but this was awfully good-natured of him. A sweetness that was almost too much, like a bite of cake that was all frosting. 

She brushes her fingers along his knee thoughtfully. Just because her hands are already there, and she’s a little nervous around him still. 

Ben shivers at the touch. His mouth falls open.

Rey is shocked that he reacted as if to pure obscenity. She hasn’t done anything wild. They were  _ in a library. _

“Do you come here a lot?”

Curiosity gets the better of her. She knew he was busy around the convent, she had an idea of how many tasks he had in a given day, but finding Ben at the library is a surprise. He certainly looks comfortable. 

He shakes his head. Then shrugs. That seems to amend the first answer. And only makes it murkier.

Rey gingerly lifts the book he was reading off the floor and takes a look at the title. It’s a novel. She doesn’t recognize it, or the author, and doesn’t know what to ask next. 

She sets it down. His hand spans the cover almost protectively when it is back at his side. 

She hears his breath heave when she settles her chin on her folded hands, right on his knee. 

“I was looking for gardening books,” she says quietly. 

This is the longest they’ve talked since they’ve been married. Usually if she felt he needed to know something, she’d declare it to him, and if he needed to do something, he’d just do it. “For that plot out back.”

He looks a little surprised by her industry. 

Slowly, he gets up off the floor. At first she thinks the conversation is over, as abruptly as all of them ended before their wedding, but he holds out a hand to her. Rey takes it, and he guides her to her feet. Once she’s standing she swipes her hands nervously over her old dress. It didn’t take well to her sitting on the floor.

Ben takes her gently by the elbow and knowledgeably brings her to another shelf across the room. He must come here a lot. That's a factor of his day she wants to carefully reconsider. When he's not fixing up a lavatory sink, he may be here. 

It’s not much by way of a gardening section, but there’s a stack of books about plants and crops, and he selects a few easily, like he knows what’s good, and she accepts them with a sense of relish when he stacks them in her arms. 

“Thanks,” she says shyly: like he’s not her husband, like they haven’t already done everything they did. 

The unexpected help makes her crack a smile up at him.

Ben swallows, and blinks down at her. He can’t seem to stop staring. Worrying his lip in his teeth, he bows his head for a second.

His lips brush up against her brow.

This seems a little much. Kissing in the library of a convent. Even if they’re married. It’s not like the dust settled on the scandal of it all. But she doesn’t move until he lifts his lips from her skin and looks at her again. Like he’s not sure if it’s okay.

Like he might carefully place another. Maybe he should. They’re  _ married. _

His breath washes against her neck, ruffling the threadbare dress she has on. In a strange way, it’s like feeling his pulse. A little too intimate for this setting. She’s more used to his smell, she  _ sleeps _ in his smell, but the effect —while less jarring— still makes her a little stupid.

This all feels like a bad joke.

“See you at home,” she says quickly, already twisting away to walk out of the library. He remains standing in the same spot until she’s outside, hugging her books to her chest.

It’s a moment where it feels like Ben can express as much as he needs to with her: and that scares her.

* * *

  
  


Because his presence in her life at the convent was so slippery and unpredictable she did not know he was ever allowed into town. 

But he was, quite similarly to Paige, given the occasional off afternoon if none of the girls were in heat. 

She didn’t know he was going. She spent the morning reading from her gardening books like any other day, taking careful notes, and raided one of the shed Ben used as a groundskeeper for supplies. The weeds in the plot of land behind the cottage were more intimidating from far away, they were mostly dried out and dead. That afternoon she wandered about where the empty beds piled in slightly raised rows, hands in her pockets, testing the lushness of the earth with her feet. 

And planning. What would go in what corner. With what little money she had when she came here, hidden in the seam of her suitcase, she had sent out an order for seeds a few weeks ago that should be arriving soon. It was easy enough to get Ben to send out a letter for her with the rest of the Sister’s mail. 

She thought over her purchases and tried to place them in the empty plot. Filling corners. 

She’s washing the dirt from her hands, a whole corner of the garden cleared by the end of the day, when he comes back. 

She never knew he was gone. 

It’s not like he could  _ tell _ her he was going to town. They’ve both adapted to this in their own odd way. Rey acts like she’s already used to it, he acts like he has nothing to say. So it’s odd to admit that there are times where it would have been nice to know when he comes back with a shopping bag in his hand, looking as clean as he did when he left the cabin this morning. 

Which is rare, from how much around the convent needs something fixed. 

She blinks at him and wipes her wet hands on her skirt. All day she’d had no idea where her husband was, or that he wasn’t where she thought he’d be, and she wasn’t aware of it until now. What if she’d needed him?

The thought is a little ridiculous given the distance that existed between them in this house. They couldn’t even argue about going to services together. He just makes a point, every Sunday and even for daily Vespers, to clean himself up and stare at her very pointedly until he leaves the cabin at the sound of the bell. Without her. 

It can’t be said that she isn't being given the chance to go with him. He lingers at the door every time, trying very hard to make that clear that she can: or even should. She can choose to.

That much is communicated. That he’s going, and she’s staying. And that, even in silence, speaks volumes. 

Ben stands there awkwardly for a second and then opens up the paper bag. The crinkling is the loudest thing in the world now that the faucet has turned off. She’s not sure what’s the biggest source of silence: him or the solitude. 

His large hands gently lift a blue dress out of the bag. 

She stares at it as it unfolds from where he holds it up at the shoulders.

Rey tilts her head like she’s being asked her opinion instead of being offered. 

“Pretty,” she says with a nod. 

Ben just keeps holding it like she’s supposed to take it from him. 

She is. 

This is where Rey feels like it’s not just her husband. She’s a bad listener. She kept him waiting like she was supposed to approve the dress and then give it to someone else. Of course it’s for her. 

Swallowing, she crosses the kitchen and takes it from him. Looking closer and the pretty linen fabric. It’ll be nice for the hot weather. Breathable. Comfortable. 

She smiles at him.

“Should I try it on?”

She’s always relieved when she can ask  _ yes _ or  _ no. _ That's manageable. For both of them. 

He nods, that relief seeming to fill him as well. 

Her hands reach for the buttons at the front of her dress, parting them and slowly exposing her stomach.

Ben lets out a breath and steps back. 

He’s being respectful, she knows this. They sleep next to each other every night. Some days she wakes up with him holding her. But sleeping beside him, marrying him, gives him granted access to her breasts, her ass, anything he feels like copping a feel of. At this point, she’d hardly blame him. 

The rut was one thing; but his self control is immense.

It still stings a little that he’s not one to take liberties. Her good Catholic husband.

Her ratty old dress is sinking off her shoulders, pooling at the sleeves caught on her elbows, but she freezes at how nervous he looks.

“Um...sorry,” she says, and turns with it half-off to keep her back to him as she undresses. 

He’s her  _ husband.  _

She thinks about the bite he never gave her. That’s about as clear a lack of commitment as one can give. 

Biting her lip, she tries to keep the changing from her old dress to her new one as quick and modest as possible. Maybe she should have gone to the bedroom to do this.

_ They sleep in the same bed; this is getting ridiculous. _

She hands twist behind her for the zipper of the blue dress. She can keep the old one for gardening, not have to worry about keeping it clean. And wear this one for...whatever it is she might choose to do, when she figured that out.

It feels nice, the airiness of the skirt, though she gets stuck trying to get the zipper all the way up.

His hands brush hers out of the way and he gently pulls the zipper until it’s closed. 

She glances over her shoulder at him. He’s standing just behind her, breathing heavily. 

Ben stares at her for a moment and then lifts her hair off her neck. There’s a little bit of sweat coating her skin from her afternoon outside. She wants to apologize but he’s the one getting so close. Like he likes it. His nose brushes her bare nape.

She might be moving too much because his hands cup her stomach to keep her from flinching away.

“Ben,” she moves against his hands, testing how strongly he holds her still, “what are you doing?”

Because it is confusing, and frightening, and has her so wet for him already and he hasn’t even kissed her. There was not much for her to do everyday to keep Ben’s home, but an introduction to this task illuminates her. It’s not like an orphan, then a nun, knew how often married couples congressed with each other. It could be every full moon, it could be every day. Every day didn’t sound very Catholic. Too indulgent. If they were waiting for something on the calendar, why was it now? 

He lets go of her all at once, stepping back. Her hair falls back over the place that is still warm from the steam of his breath. 

She trembles not at his touch. But to be left like that. Smoothing her hands over her new skirt. 

“I’ll make dinner—” she had learned a few skills on kitchen duty as her time in the Order, and walks blindly to the counter to grab instruments to cook with before she even knows what she’d make.

He goes up to her and cups her face in his hand. She thinks it’s going to start all over again. Getting close. Examining her. Deciding she’s something he does not want. 

Ben touches his finger to the furrow between her brows and gently smooths it down. 

She tends to think it’s impossible to ever understand each other, but then he does things like this. He can communicate, and well at that. He’s just...quiet about it. 

As his thumb softly flattens out the crease of stress on her forehead, she can practically hear him say  _ don’t worry.  _

* * *

She doesn’t know how to ask. 

She knows how to ask. But she’s not sure how they can graspingly make plans together unless she just tells him and nods. And if it is something, like this, where she technically needs permission, she doesn’t like asking yes or no when he can just say no, or telling him and having him ignore her. 

Confirming that he would just ignore her, or use his limited communication to deny her, is a little too much to take when she has him for the rest of her life.

She scratches her gland absently. Maybe not. If she found someone else to mate her, any court in the country would rule to end their marriage.

Finally it falls out of her mouth at the breakfast table. 

“I’d like to go into town.”

Why can’t she, after all? She’s married. If he hasn’t bitten her, that’s not her fault. Though it’s exactly while he’ll probably say no. 

Ben sits back in his chair and raises his eyebrows. She hasn’t asked him for much. They live comfortably together, sleep in the same bed, and sometimes he’ll walk into the room when she’s reading and she’ll tell him what she’s reading about.  _ Perennials. Dead Head. Chlorosis.  _

There is a routine in this. Rey would even admit it is calm, and safe,  _ and— _

She hasn’t had to do a single thing with her life she hasn’t wanted to. No vows. No commands. No duties. 

She’s freer as a wife than she is as a nun: for now. 

Until having to pose this request.

Ben just nods and tosses the keys of the truck on the table. He walks alongside it as she pulls out from the gravel lot by the shed. She’s not a great driver but in exchange for fixing things, one of the priests at the orphanage taught her the basics. No road laws: but out here it’s so secluded she won’t have to worry too hard about that, going to the three stores in town. 

She doesn’t tell her husband because he doesn’t need to worry. Too much depends on her doing this without incident or he'll have grounds to never let her do it again. 

Ben helps her with moving the walls out the car’s path: all three of them. So much work for what’s really a whim for Rey. And when she hops into the car one last time, at the base of the mountain, he slides her $20. 

This makes her eyes go watery. Obviously he doesn’t think she’ll go anywhere. But this is gas, and maybe a meal, and she has the truck now. Something leaning towards a grand escape floats in her mind. Maybe not this time. But if she can do this again, plan it better, save this twenty and maybe get another next time…

Ben smiles at her, and, surprising her, leans through the open window to kiss her cheek. 

It startles her, in a shock of a hot flush spreading across her cheeks. He’s leaning back and walking to the truck bed like he can’t look at her when the kiss is done. She’s happy he took the liberty, honestly. She was beginning to think he’d been having regrets. 

Rey looks back up the mountain, where the convent is hidden out of sight.

She wonders how he guards the place without the blocks up on the road. Obviously he rarely leaves: but he still can. Though he can probably scent an Alpha from a mile away. But what about now, or if the wall is down for Paige to take her time off?

Ben answers her by pulling a folding chair out of the bed of the pickup. A light one, a lawn chair, something that someone would sit in to fish. Good for waiting. She looks closer, wondering what he intends to do with it when she goes into town.

Then he reaches for a toolbox in the idling truck bed and takes out a .45. 

A fishing chair, for catching things. It’s more than clear what he’ll be doing while she’s gone.

* * *

  
  


Rey wastes a whole afternoon in town. 

Once she’s there, she surveys her options. General store. Diner. Hardware store. 

Only this would feel like luxury, like possibility, after living in that convent for all this time.

She foolishly blows through ten dollars at the hardware store because her heart tugs at the thought of the dingy shed that barely has enough equipment to keep her garden alive. And these purchases do make her flush with pleasure. 

Any escape she could make would lead to a shitty life: so why not decorate her cage?

She sits in the diner and keeps opening and re-opening the bag with a smile to herself, sipping a milkshake that is  _ also  _ a waste of money but she just wants to be spending time somewhere that has nothing to do with the convent for an hour. 

And chatting with her waitress. She was never chatty before, but now innocuous, somewhat insipid observations burst out of her every time she makes eye contact with someone. 

_ At least she could find people to talk to. She could get a break from the silence and make small talk. _

A man with bright red hair walks in. The bell chimes. Rey scents something familiar. 

It’s the Alpha from the gate. 

Rey sinks into her seat with panic in her eyes. The napkin dispenser’s solid metal: maybe if she chucks it through the window at her side, she can escape to the parking lot, and maybe if she makes it to the car in time—

He sits down at the counter and orders a coffee. 

Rey tries to create a barrier screen with her folded menu. It’s fruitless. Hiding in her seat, she sees him twitch around over one shoulder and sniff. 

He looks at her. Cowering in her booth. 

Rey swallows down her heart in her throat and grits her teeth. This isn’t a fight she planned on having, but until there’s a command, she can still have it. Ben’s scent swims around her. 

But she’s not mated. It could all end here.

He turns around like there’s nothing of interest to him here and chats with the waitress at the counter. 

Rey tries to calm her pulse. As gingerly as possible, she pays and slides out of her booth, making a mad dash for the door. She doesn’t settle until she’s pulling the truck out of the parking lot. 

Never once does she lift her eyes from the door. But he’s still there, at the counter. Didn’t even move when she ran. 

She  _ almost _ ends her few hours of freedom right there. On the drive back, she switches through the radio until she sees one of the stone walls at the edge of the trees. 

Where they found Bazine. 

She hasn’t seen her former sister since that night. She can’t imagine her old roommate would want to see her. But when a singer warbles her way through her heartbreak on the radio, Rey pauses for a moment before steering onto the long drive up to the convent. 

Impulsively, and not safely at all, Rey turns the truck around. 

* * *

  
  


Rey doesn’t budge on going to Vespers that night. Ben doesn’t push it. 

Her soul is rested enough from the quiet meditation spent in the afternoon alone in town, and her belly is full of ice cream from the shake. This is the most spoiled she’s been since she came here. 

It’s almost nice being a wife, on days like today, it’s not much but she’s certainly freer than if she was a nun.

And she doesn’t have to go to mass. 

There’s not much to tempt her to ever go inside that chapel again. It’s too haunted by her own worst sins. A choice she can’t take back. She’s not sure she should be forgiven for it, or if she should even bother to ask for forgiveness when her only other option was to be strapped down in the infirmary. 

Rey supposes she can’t fix her soul. But she’s hopeful about fixing one thing.

After Ben leaves, she gathers up her latest purchase and belatedly walks over to enact her plan. 

She’s at least comfortable when Vespers is over. 

This is a vulnerable place to be when a chapel full of nuns walk out at the end of the evening. There’s even a gasp or two to see Rey sitting there in a lawn chair amongst the fireflies, blanket around her shoulders, and the radio station filling the courtyard with a syrupy singing voice. Cozy as can be. The Caretaker’s wife, the Convent’s whore, the Alpha’s Omega. 

This is everyone seeing her at once, when she’s mostly managed to avoid the whispers thus far. Ben’s little cottage protects her somewhat from the scandal. But she can’t live with Ben alone all of her life. Now’s the time for the hard stuff.

Rey bites her lip until she’s sure Bazine is amongst the cluster of habits and turns up the volume on the radio. 

It’s like a moth to a flame. She hears a shocked  _ whoop _ and Bazine is racing out of the chapel towards her chair. Her veil soared behind her like a cape. Nuns weren’t supposed to run like that: but who other than God could tell Bazine that?

Bazine drops to her knees in front of Rey’s chair because she is as close to her version of salvation as she can get.

“Where’d you get it?” she gasps, clutching the small, portable radio in her hands like a holy grail, pressing her ear close to the tinny song scratching its way out of the speaker. 

It’s not perfect, but as Rey is learning, it’s easy to find something amidst the nothing. 

Bazine actually grins up at her. It’s good to see her again.

“I’m sorry,” Rey whispers. 

Her old roommate shrugs. Her smile doesn’t even drop. There’s a song humming in her ear and it seems like her mood cannot be changed now that it’s been improved.

It’s odd for Rey to be the one with a new dress and a radio and a husband amongst the two of them. The universe demanded it be Bazine. 

“God never gives you more than you can handle,” Bazine responds morbidly, not looking at her, in a tone Rey is sure is an imitation of someone else’s lesson.

There is a crowd of girls stalling going back to the dining hall for dinner. Superiors herd them up the path. Ben has finally exited the chapel and surveys the scene with an expression too confused to strike fear into her.

Rey grasps both of Bazine’s hands. 

“Come over whenever you want to listen to music.”

Bazine squeezes back and nods. This invitation isn’t something to be taken casually. Sanctuary never is.

Then she stands and folds up her chair. 

By the time he reaches them, Ben looks a little amused, instead of grumpy that she’d come all the way to the chapel to cause a scene but not to attend Vespers with him. 

He even neatly takes her lawn chair, the same one from the back of the truck he had sat in all afternoon guarding the path to the main road, and carries it for her on the walk back to the cottage. 

A scene or not, it’s nice to have a moment that actually felt public, for the first time in a long time. She waves to Bazine, and even to the glimpse she catches of Rose and Paige. They wave back, like they don’t know what to make of her, but choose to be polite.

Rose pauses and sniff the air for a moment, before Paige leads her away by the elbow.

Rey holds onto the radio, and as fond of it as she clearly is, Bazine doesn’t try to take it with her.

They know what happens to things that stay in the convent. 

* * *

  
  


Bazine does sneak away as often as possible to listen to music at the cabin. 

At first Rey fears it’ll be awkward: an exercise in punishment for returning Bazine to the convent during her escape attempt. For deepening her suffering. She waits for that kind of fighting between Omegas at this place that every girl warned her would absolutely hook her like a fish.

She bakes cookies and tries to keep the house nice in anticipation for this. 

When she arrives, Bazine cares little about anything but the radio. 

She eats the cookies Rey made as if she doesn’t even care what they taste like. Neither of them end up sitting in the worn furniture that came with the house that Rey had tried to clean. Rey rarely even uses it when she is alone in the house and in the recent warmer months she’d rather sit on the back porch looking out over her garden. By the end of Bazine’s first visit, they are both sprawled on the floor by the portable plastic radio like teenagers, like girls, languidly reaching for snacks and the lemonade Rey mixed from a powder pack. 

They don't talk much. But when it's over, Bazine wipes the crumbs from her hands on her black skirt and says "I'll be back soon?"

Rey nods. Glad to have a visitor.

Her next visit, Rey is in the garden. The radio is propped up in the dirt, which has improved the act of gardening when it’s hot out immensely. 

She wasn’t expecting Bazine this time. She drops her work gloves to get something on a plate to serve her guest, but Bazine waves her off, blinking in the sunshine.

Bazine surveys the garden with a hand blocking the rays from her eyes. She looks half impressed, half pitying.

“You _would_ get out of this place and immediately find the most boring hobby on the planet.”

Rey wipes the sweat from her brow with what feels like the first real laugh in a long time.

“I never really got out of this place.”

She hadn’t known just how much Bazine hadn’t forgiven her yet until Rey sees in that moment Bazine finally did. Forgive her. Right then.

Rey hadn’t escaped in a way to spark any envy. 

Bazine clears her throat and grabs a dandelion by the leaves, yanking it out of the earth. 

They spend the afternoon working in the garden without speaking, the radio humming over the silence.

* * *

Rey is so distracted with the garden that evening, after Bazine goes back to wash up for Vespers, she doesn't even sense Ben approaching until he presses his nose to the sun-warmed triangle of skin at her nape. 

She shivers when he nuzzles her, bowing her forward with his weight. His fingers twist the radio knob into silence and it’s all crickets and the sound of his breath in an instant.

It’s a fine greeting. 

He’s blocking the sun from her now, but from the blue glow at the level of the grass, she’s neglected the house to be out here for too long. He doesn’t seem unhappy with her about it. Instead he just presses insistently. Like her attention, not her duty, is to be claimed. 

Impulsively, she covers his hands with hers and brings them to the dirt in front of her, the soft, plush, fertile soil, and her chest warmed with pride when he guides their fingers to sift appreciatively into the bed. Showing him what she’s been up to. His response pleases her.

Ben is kind about all the time she spends out here. He smiles at her dirty knees and, when he can’t find her in the house when he gets home, comes out like he does now to survey her work. 

This is his first time sneaking up on her out here though.

His nose nudges to a ticklish place under her jaw as he circles the rich earth between his fingers and thumb. He notices. 

He lifts their hands to wrap his arms around her waist. He’s already folded her over. 

He could take her, like this. She wonders, again, faintly why he doesn’t.

“How was—your day,” she grunts as he squeezes the air out of her for an instant, then loosens his hold. He didn’t seem to realize two sets of arms might be a tighter fit around her middle.

He hums deep in his throat, a  _ so-so _ sound, absent, like he’d rather not talk about things with them currently like this. 

She likes that he has a sound that’s dismissive of conversation regardless of his ability to participate. 

His hands settle over her ribs and stroke up and down. Held where her breath rests. It’s strangely intimate to have him stroking her there as she inhales and exhales.

He coaxes her backwards, gathering her more into his lap, and purrs once she’s there. He’s got her so tight in his arms. Then his lips brush her ear, then down her neck.

At first surprised by his forwardness, Rey laughs at a realization.

“I know what you smell,” she glances over her shoulder at him, “close, but it’s not my heat yet.”

Ben draws back, lifting off of her, and her heart sinks. She hadn’t meant it as a rejection. She just didn’t want to be put on bedrest prematurely when she had probably another few days to tend this bed, out here in her garden.

But the gentle chiding takes him away. Her skin burns with the absence of his touch, her face bowed over the dirt in rejected horror.

At least it’s a confirmation of what he’s been waiting for. 

* * *

  
  


“Could your parents speak?”

It’s the first time she’s openly mentioned the muteness. Obviously ignorant of it when they first met, she was too ashamed of herself to acknowledge it, maybe thinking it would embarrass him.

Ben startles beside her in bed. She was so worn from today's revelation that she had, without a second thought, cuddled up next to him with her head on his chest when they climbed in together. Just to feel a little safer. It’s still there, the comfort he brings as an Alpha, along with the fear he brings as a stranger. She’ll have to live with both.

Closer to heat, it’s easier. To just show what she needs. 

He nods after a long, thoughtful pause. 

Rey worries her lips in her teeth. 

“Were you born that way?”

He shakes his head quickly. 

This makes her heart pound. That he had something that went away. That there was a past that _ could _ speak. 

Ben fidgets for a minute. She’s unnerved him. She hadn’t meant to. But there’s so much she doesn’t know about him. He can be uncomfortable for this conversation when she’s been uncomfortable with so much. 

But she’s not being entirely fair, so she tries to help:

"Were you—" she licks her lips and drums up a theory that she had considered while gardening the other day, "were you sick?"

He shakes his head again. She doesn't like every guess that misses, because it clearly hurts him.

“What happened?”

But it’s a question her husband can’t answer. 

He tries, though.

Ben glances at their surroundings. On the side table, there’s an empty glass. Looking pointedly at her, he grasps the lip of the entire glass with his fingertips surrounding it and slides it to the edge of the table. 

It rests there, precarious even in his hand.

For some reason she can’t breathe. Even as she’s sure where this is going. She wants to reach out and stop it from happening. Rescuing something fragile.

She clings to him in that moment of tension. 

When he’s sure she’s looking, seeing where it is caught dangling, he lets the entire glass tip from his hand and drop to the floor. 

It breaks when it falls. But somehow that seems like his intention.

* * *

  
  


Ben finds them both on the third visit. 

Bazine stayed later than intended, though these music sessions are rarely defined by hours, an amorphous bubble of buzzing channels.

He discovers them sprawled out on the rug of the small sitting room that is more an extension of the kitchen, a popular song blaring and both women half-asleep. 

He’s not hard to notice, the radio feels less noisy, less powerful, with the casual thudding of his footsteps. He looks perplexed to see someone else in his home, Bazine stretched out in her black habit like a Parisian model, and it’s a strange interruption to the calm, lazy afternoon. 

Bazine doesn’t even stop her half-singing along, looking upside-down at Ben without lifting her head from the carpet. 

Rey watches them for longer than she should. She should step in, do introductions, make excuses for loss of time. But instead she just watches her husband and this unmated Omega with alert curiosity. She finds her instincts don’t make her actively territorial yet, but the kind that sinks back into the background to watch. Waiting for a sign that would lead her to strike.

She wants to see how he rests his attention on someone else. 

Ben waves at the nun in his living room and goes into the kitchen. He’s got dirt on his hands, which Rey feels is very vulnerable, shows how he wasn’t ready for her to have friends over, and maybe she should have said something. Rey knows enough about his day to know he’s here to wash up for Vespers. Which means Bazine should probably go soon. 

She stretches her sun-warmed limbs like a cat before she pushes herself to sit up on her palms.

“Did you want to eat before Vespers?”

There’s not much time to do that. The service is brief, and it’s not like Ben stays afterwards for conversation, so sometimes they eat before, sometimes after. The odds are no more stacked than a coin toss if she should have had something ready. Even then, Ben’s pretty good about eating when he’s hungry, and not expecting her to anticipate that. He’s just so much bigger than her. It’s hard to plan around his body. It’s chaotic.

Sometimes she watches him as he goes to sit down to dinner across from her, smiling at her and looking in her eyes with no shyness, that she feels he is enticingly so.

He shakes his head and waves his hand now, like she doesn’t need to worry about it. 

Bazine twists over onto her stomach on the rug, her feet hovering in the air behind her.

“How’s married life, Ben?”

He gives Bazine a smile that is kinder praise than anything Rey has earned. It is almost obscenely happy: which she can’t understand. It’s an answer, a clear one, and it makes her blush.

She bows her head in embarrassment and picks at the threadbare rug. This reflection of her actions is a poor comparison to reality. 

She wonders what Bazine thinks of the lack of scar on her gland. Unbitten. There are few things Bazine is too kind to mention: but this seems to be one of them. 

Ben awkwardly clambers out of the kitchen with a clean dishrag and heads over to the bathroom. 

Both girls are quiet until the tap starts running.

“How is married life?”

Her voice is low enough to imply Rey should just be honest. It’s like they’re back in the dormitory, gossiping from across the space between their small beds. 

Rey bites her lip. 

“He’s gentle. Sometimes I even think I’m lucky. He can’t command, you know, so it’s just...normal, almost.”

Bazine snorts. 

“All a girl can ask for,” her eyes turn too wise for Rey’s liking, “how was it? Giving all this up for a heat spent with  _ that—” _

Rey flushes and wraps her arms around her knees. No one’s really asked her how she felt about this. Even before it started.

“You’ve been through heat. You know how out of your mind you are. I can’t remember half of it. But he’s a good Alpha. He took care of me—”

She probably shouldn’t tell anyone this, but it’s been getting to her.

“—but he hasn’t touched me since.”

Bainze leans her weight onto one hip, looking at Rey incredulously. 

_ “Never?” _

Rey feels better from Bazine’s shock: like all envy over her situation is now gone.

“He’ll kiss me on the cheek and stuff. But no, we haven’t properly had sex even once since my heat.”

Bazine let out a low whistle, ticking up the volume of the radio a hair. Rey can hear what silence she’s trying to fill. The mental calculation of all the months since that happened.

“Here I thought you were giving him a good reason to go to confession so much.”

Rey laughs off the joke for a second, but Bazine’s face is serious. 

“What?” she asks fuzzily, hearing the tap in the distance shut off. 

Bazine’s expression turns carefully guarded. Maybe for Rey’s protection. Maybe her own.

“He goes to confession every single week.”

For a moment Rey thinks the radio broke —a sting at a frequency so high she couldn’t hear anything at all— until the silence gives way with the next song crashing into her in a crush of fast noise. 

Her mouth falls open, lungs seizing, hands digging into the floor.

_ “What did you say?” _

* * *

  
  


She is beyond the good behavior required for the church: and certainly any other acceptable behavior in polite circles. 

There’s probably less than a half hour until Vespers. Since Ben’s only just come home to wash up. And she has to go  _ now. _ It’s beyond sense or reason. She left Bazine, an unmated Omega, in her home with her husband, her  _ Alpha. _

Logically, there isn’t time for the scene she wants to cause. But as soon as she catches sight of the priest lighting the candles, she knows the only time is now.

This is the bastard who married them. This is the person who probably knows more of her husband's secrets than anyone else.

Because this is the man who  _ hears _ her husband’s confession every single week.

She shoves the old man into the wall of the chapel. 

“What does he say to you?”

Rey is spitting with anger. 

_ Secrets. All these lies. Feeling so powerless all the time.  _

The priest’s blue eyes blink at her with an eerie, distanced perception, like an owl. He doesn’t seem too shocked to be pinned here by an Omega in a rage.

“That’s between a sinner and his priest.”

She nearly yowls in his face. 

“He is my husband. If he’s been  _ speaking _ to you—”

She is promptly pushed off from her grip on him. She can take it back if she wants, or thrash him, but her wrath surpasses the thought of returning her aggression to the same point. She stands back, trembling, with so much hate in her heart in that moment. 

He just looks at her while he straightens out the collar she rumpled with her sweaty hands.

“There are various ways a person can communicate. There are infinitely more for them to communicate with their God. Not all of us can atone in the same way.”

Her throat gulps down air, trying to understand, knowing she’s been told  _ something. _ She clings for any meaning at all. Bazine let something slip. It’s why she’s so angry. Ben goes to confession  _ a lot.  _

She doesn’t understand. He goes to confession. He doesn’t go there to sit and not be able to ask and then be forgiven; that’s not reconciliation.

The Father looks on her with pity crossing his craggy, bearded face. 

“He can’t talk, Rey. He never will.”

She grabs his collar again.

“He is in a confessional  _ with you! _ How can he ask for forgiveness?”

Her hot fury is only answered by a cool vagueness. It's like fighting with a ghost. She doesn't like those eyes reading her. Judging her. 

This is probably why she'd avoided the church since her wedding.

“Do you need Ben to have been able to talk all along for his own good?” he looks at her, somehow even more distant than when her rage started. Looming, even, “Or do you just need it to be that way so it's easy for you?”

Rey drops her shaking hands from where they’d been gripping the crisp dog collar of his shirt. She takes a deep breath that becomes a sob.

"If that's what you want to believe, that there is some vow he can break for you, you seem to be missing how many he already has. Ben's earned his way to commune with God. Maybe if you listen, he'll be able to do the same with you."

Rey blinks at him.

_ God, or Ben? _

Ben is devout. She always knew that. He hadn’t missed a single Vespers. Knowing what she knew now, he hadn’t missed a single confession. There _ had  _ to be something more to it though. All the notes, all the lies, how  _ pleased _ with himself he looked when they were ordered to be married.

It's not that this one thing could be true. It's that everything else could be false.

She had thought spoken orders were the most dangerous things to someone like her. But she had given up all of her freedom to man who had never spoken a word to her.

The old priest straightens himself out and casts her a pitying glance.

“Some things even his old priest can understand. Ben doesn’t speak with me when he enters the confessional. He just weeps.”

* * *

  
  


Ben knows something happened when he walks into the cottage. 

It’s beyond Rey to hide it, or care, because he walks in and goes completely still. 

He doesn’t see her right away. Since he’s not looking near the ground. But he senses her distress in the air.

She’d spent most of the evening flicking through radio stations on the floor of the cabin’s small sitting room. She must have been here for all of Vespers and never listened to more than twenty seconds of a song before irritably changing to another station. 

Can he sense this radiating off of her? Or had the priest gone straight to him and told him that Rey thought—

She covers her face with her hands at Ben’s concerned expression when his eyes land on her, folded over by the radio on the floor.

—had his priest told him of her sins, that his wife thought he was _lying_ .

A little sound, like the unnerved coo of a frightened pigeon, slips from his lips when he lays eyes on her. There’s a heavy thump on the rug when he drops to his knees in front of her. 

She can’t take her hands down now. Now that he’ll be looking at her face which is red from crying and being rubbed raw by her hands.

Her agitation creases up her brain in a headache. Before this it always felt like her brain was a vacuous black space in her skill where her mind lived. Thoughts drifting on an empty sea. Now she can feel it as a thing that lives inside her, tight now like a tensed muscle, throbbing in the chalice of bone where body and blood mixed. 

Her life is so simple that it’s impossible for her to understand anymore: she is something that’s his. 

She doesn’t know what that is.

Ben gently touches his thumb down insistently to flatten out the wrinkle between her brows. It’s come to mean something between them. But it also shows how little is between them at all.

It’s like it gets worse when someone else is in the room to hear her. Instinctually she cries louder like how even an infant knows to cry for someone to come help it.

Ben gently settles her head to his chest and holds her, rocking her, and she buries her face in his shirt. 

“I don’t really know you at all.”

* * *

This is the only time that she’s grateful to be aware of his presence. It makes finding him easy.

She’d fallen asleep in his arms last night still crying. He wanted her to feel better with every fiber of his being. She felt it. Knew it in how he stroked her hair and eased her body against his. Even if he didn’t know the source, he wanted to take her pain away into himself. 

Because he cares about her. She can’t keep lying. 

He smiles whenever he sees her like he wants to share his happiness with her. He cuddles her at night. There is at least interest, instinct, surrounding her upcoming heat, even if that’s all she’ll get. Perhaps he doesn’t want to be as hasty as their wedding was about mating her. Or maybe he’s looking for something better. But now his days seem to be enough for him. With her.

And she will never  _ know _ him.

Why he cries in confession every week. 

Everything feels fake after knowing this. Maybe he’s not even happy with her at all. 

He’s at one of the walls that stem from the front gate, that loop through the woods surrounding the whole grounds. Not the drive that leads to the main road, but one that is just winding through the trees, where no one would think to wander on foot. 

She assumes he’s making a repair, or checking that the boundary is still solidly set. Her steps are heavy but he doesn’t hear her: it’s all sunlight and birdsong and so normal that she almost doesn’t want to bother him with a question she’ll know the answer to just by looking in his eyes. 

What does she say? 

_ I asked your priest if you could speak this whole time, and he tells me you cry instead? What’s wrong? _

_ Have I done something to you? _

_ Why are you hurt? What broke? _

Ben doesn’t see her as he goes to the wall and pulls free a stone that is clearly not being removed from the structure for the first time from the way it comes loose in his hand. 

He doesn’t know that she’s there when he takes out a note and places it in his pocket. 

By the time he’s putting the stone back, his wife is running back up the hill, out of breath, and terrified.

  
  


* * *

“What do the notes say?”

Rose drops the basket of laundry in her hands at the foot of the cabin’s steps. 

She glances up at Rey with wide eyes.

Rey just sips her coffee from the porch. The thing Bazine was she was a good person for if you needed anything. Contraband lipstick, a secret. A little push over who was assigned laundry delivery on a certain day. 

Rose doesn’t answer, but Rey never expects her to.

Her voice travels: but in the thicket of forest, that small path that connects the cottage only by a thread to the convent, no one will overhear. 

Rey has hopes to let that path grow over and have it just be her and Ben secluded out here. 

Half-hopes. Or maybe just instincts.

“The notes you pass with my husband? Planning for your next heat, so you won’t have to suffer it alone again?”

Rey can feel her own cruelty. She has something so many of the girls in this convent want. To be found. Owned. 

Belonging.

Except for that one part. She’s about as claimed as any of them. And the notes make her more than aware of that. 

She could be bitten by someone else. But Ben could also mate any of these girls and there’d be no court of law that would keep him with her. He’d leave.

Rose swallows. 

“In a sense, yes.”

Rey can only cling to her mug. At least everyone is being honest now. 

Rose shakes her head. 

“Not even Ben knows…”

This snaps Rey out of the coiling rage that is creating turmoil in her skull. 

“What?”

The little nun glances out to the path that leads to the main building. Then at the woods. 

“I’ve had...a sweetheart for a few years. Paige let me come with her into town after my first heat, I guess she’d promised just to get me through it. I met an Alpha at the diner. He was just passing through, but he moved here to be closer to me, Rey. He came back for me. He’s written letters and scents them so I’ll know he’s never been with anyone else. He’s waited all this time.”

Rey is too stunned by the news to remember what she was even angry about. And astounded because it just seems too impossible.

“What about Ben?”

Rose rubs her brow tiredly. 

“Ben thinks it’s just notes. Silly things to get me through my day. He doesn’t know what they say.”

Something strange lashes across Rey’s mind. A chip in the goodness Ben carried about him. A liar in those kind eyes. She has found his sins.

“He knows he’s allowing an Alpha to have access to an Omega he’s protecting.”

“Paige told him,” Rose takes a deep breath, “Paige told Ben that, after I was caught with the letters he had sent by post and I was punished, that I’d just go running after him if they destroyed all contact. Her idea was it was something to look forward to. Something small. A wish. She did it because she doesn’t understand all this, heat and mating and commands—”

There’s no stopping it. Like the fall of man.

Rey suddenly sees Rose as her sister: as someone loved who cannot be stopped.

“But he can command you. Paige is trying to protect you. How do you know that anything you choose is your own will or something a man in a diner told you to do?”

“Are those commands any better for me than what I have to do  _ here?” _

Under the orderly veil of her wimple, Rose’s face is all fire. Rey sets her mug down on the windowsill with a slow, steadying breath. Nothing made sense. 

Trading one obedience for another.

One thing did make sense. Her stranger. Odd how in certain lights, he could be familiar. If Paige gave him permission, then he’d help Rose. That felt true about him. Someone appealing to his kindness, perhaps his loneliness. 

Rey remembered the Alpha at the gate, who just wanted to talk. Who left without incident. He wasn’t there to fight. 

Who could care less that she was alone at a diner, her sweaty hair unbound, even though he could have taken her.

“How do you know you can trust him?”

Rose shakes her head. 

“It’s not knowing. I’m sure you’ve felt it. He can’t hurt me any more than Ben can hurt you. It wars with their nature.”

Rey’s impending heat was beginning to settle over her soul like a storm cloud. Ben clearly sensed the slick that came in her sleep. He twitched uncomfortably away from her in the mornings. She felt so stirred up all the time. These days he was keeping close to the cabin, finding excuses to be near even if all she did was garden all day. 

She had a feeling she would not suffer alone. But if he found this to be his duty, or his penance for how he had sinned, she wasn’t sure what kind of relief it would be.

There’s no humor in Rey’s laugh.

“You say that like there’s any power here.”

Rose’s eyes have so much hope in them. For a moment, it floods into Rey. It doesn’t drain her, it doesn’t overwhelm her, it doesn’t scare her. It supports her. She’s given strength from someone like her.

And Rose, sweet, innocent Rose, looks up at Rey with a knowing glow about her face that shows that she is aware of pleasures that not a single other nun in this place has seen.

“Yes, there is.”

* * *

  
  


“Get up.”

Bazine flinches under the covers. As Rey bounces on impact on the foot of her bed, Rose closes the door behind them.

“Shouldn’t you be at home. With your husband?”

Rey unloops the cord that she uses to tote the radio around and sets in on Bazine’s bed. The novice’s eyes flash greedily at the pale blue plastic. Even if it’s risky to have it here; she covets it. 

Rose leans against the door like a Superior is going to come break it down. 

It is a sleepy, soft night and yet it’s only just begun.

“I’ve brought you a goodbye present.”

Rose’s bag is already packed. She digs under Bazine’s bed for a bag. Rey’s old roommate tended to collect a great deal of things to keep her occupied in this cage. But Rey has a feeling she won’t really care about taking any of it. 

As it goes, Bazine slips the radio in her bag, and the lipstick Rey gave her on her first day here. There’s some clothes already folded in the case, without nowhere to wear them.

“You’re close,” Bazine says warily, instead of asking what’s going on, “are you going to be alright?”

Rey can feel it pulsing, with purpose, as if the knowledge of what had to happen sent her throttling towards it, instead of helplessly sinking into her instincts. 

Her body is readying itself to take a knot tonight. Not dreading the need to.

“That’s the plan.”

She turns to Rose.

“If anything happens to her; my Alpha could kill your Alpha.”

Bazine’s jaw drops in delighted horror. 

This is the time for Bazine to ask a million questions. But that’s the odd thing about three girls who can sense each other’s feelings. 

They just trust.

* * *

  
  


Ben closes the door very carefully when he comes back to the cabin to find Rey in the kitchen. He’s been delicate with Rey since he found her crying yesterday. She pressed her hands to her fevered stomach this morning and explained timidly to him that she was probably just emotional. 

_ Because...you know. _

That at least sparked some interest from him. 

It was a struggle to not let the look that cast over his eyes make her shudder. Those dark eyes roamed her body like it was a promise to him. Her cunt felt warmer, wetter all day, but because it wasn’t triggered by proximity to another intense throw of heat nor a rut quite yet, she could at least progress naturally through the process. Unlike last time.

She wondered if it was, like how some Betas felt about procreation, that sex had an essential final step for Ben. And he only took it in order to breed. It made sense with her heats being the right time for him. 

But he’s certainly not getting the message that it’s almost her heat, and that they can have sex again, with Rey cooking dinner with her nun’s habit and wimple back on. 

Hence his caution with the door. Hanging back. It’s like he’s interrupting something he doesn’t understand. 

Which is fair.

Rey glances over her shoulder at him. She feels contained. Covered. Kept. 

Everything on his face is a question. So obviously she can’t ignore it. 

She tucks a loose strand of hair under her veil and smoothes her heavy black skirt. 

“I just...I thought since we haven’t—we haven’t been very intimate in our marriage—maybe you didn’t want me.”

She turns back to the pan in front of her and bites her lip.

The silence is expected but still bone-chilling.

“I never took my vows, I was only a novice, so I technically didn’t break them. I’ve thought about it. Maybe they’d take me back.”

Ben does something he never does —at least, not since before they were married has he invaded her space in such a predatory way— and crowds her to the counter. He backs her away from the stove and turns it off without even looking away at her, then he  _ engulfs _ her. His hand on her waist and another cupping her elbow and his eyes wide with confusion. 

There’s so much in his eyes she keeps expecting him to open his mouth and speak.

He holds up two crossed fingers. Crossed. Twisted. 

She blinks at him and this guessing game. 

_ Entwined? _

Ben thuds the fingers against his chest, and, blushingly, gestures downward below his waist with his hand still held with two fingers crossed. 

_ Tangled. Lying.  _

He wants her to connect the hand sign with that part of his...anatomy. She glances up at him.

“Knot?”

He nods, light flashing in his eyes when she reads his rudimentary sign for  _ knot. _

It’s hard not to be impressed by his cleverness, or feel victory from this, but there’s no time.

Her head shakes up at him sadly.

“I did take your knot. I’m hoping that’s a sin I can be forgiven for,” she swallows, testing her theory with heavy pressure on him, “since you don’t want me, I thought I should let you go, maybe the convent will take me back if I repent enough—”

Ben falls to his knees in front of her with a whimper. His hands clutch her hips. Even she’s a little surprised at the show of devotion. She thought he’d bristle at this game she was playing because Rey was his property. That he would take the effort to prove she was not her own to leave him.

Or at least, if he bit her, she wouldn’t be.

Ben looks up at Rey like she owns him.

“You don’t have sex with me,” she whines a little, struggling in his tight grasp, a little Omega nun again. “I know it’s wrong for me to want it. But you won’t touch me and I’m not your mate and I don’t understand.”

His arms snap around her body like the body of a sea serpent pulling a ship into the watery abyss. Her knees cave like a cracked mast and she goes down into his lap. 

“Ben,” she soothes, and with a shy hand, she presses her thumb to smooth the crease of worry that wrinkles between his brows. “I’m sorry.”

He groans. It’s guttural, it shakes the house, but Rey doesn’t have the time to react to the sound because she’s on the floor. His lips are on her throat as he mouths at the hot skin of her gland. Intact. Perhaps more tempting than virginity, perhaps what he preserved to atone for their sins.

“Ben, I’m wicked,” she clutches him tight by the shoulders, “I’m wretched and I’m so  _ wet. _ If you could hear my  _ thoughts. _ I am not fit to be your wife.”

He hovers over her, shaking his head frantically. 

Did he think she was a virgin by not being mated?

“I’m bad,” she persists, not liking how she’s stoking his fear as his trembling hands begin to undress her from the nun’s garb she put back on as a protest, “it’s not just your knot. It’s your cock—”

His hips shove clumsily into hers. Even with their clothes on. 

“Mhmm, the dreams I have about your cock,” she threads her fingers in his hair. “I’m not good. Not at all.”

He shakes his head and holds her. 

Rey had been too focused, swallowing her dry tongue as she listened, to blush at this lesson. Any other day she would have run and hid.

Despite the reassurance it was foolproof if she used them on her husband, back on that bed she hadn’t pictured these words working. But meaning them, right now, she knew they would topple him down.

She wonders, almost wants to ask him, if it was the novice habit, not her heat, that was the recurring theme of his desire for her. Was he more wicked than he pretended to be, wanting her at her most forbidden?

Because now he is crumbling above her. Her slick coats the front of his trousers but his eyes are on her face. He keeps looking in her eyes in shock. There’s something there: he wants her to understand. 

Her hand shakily cups his face. There’s sweat on her palm. He’s sweating too: a heat like this in the summer is going to be hell. 

“I want to understand too.”

It’s a little too real for what’s actually happening. That’s only going to hurt her in the long run to admit. But it’s true. 

She swallows the lump in her throat that this means something for him to hear her say it. It’s clear in his eyes. That he would say it too if he could. 

Rose wanted this done properly. So Rey had learned a few phrases to use from that new girl, from a few new girls ago, who sent out those pictures of herself for Alphas. 

“Fuck me. Please. I can’t be good, but I’ll be your whore, I want you to like it. Like  _ me.” _

She arches when his erection, still clothed, rubs hungrily against her bare cunt.

Are the words working on him, or herself?

She doesn’t really care. Her slick poureth over. 

“Punish me,” she pleads, gripping his shirt, “punish your whore.”

Ben grabs her hands in one swift motion, pinning them to the kitchen rug. 

Her heart stops. They have ended up in a place she hadn’t expected and that place is  _ too far. _ Ben’s chest is heaving with his breath.

He shakes his head. 

Her eyes shut. He’s going to leave her like this. More worked up than she’s ever been: on the precipice of heat, and needing desperately for him to knot her. She needs him and he’s just going to leave. 

Ben hums with discomfort, breathing heavily, before he bows to gently kiss her lips. 

Her tensed muscles relax. He lets go of her wrists and slowly undresses himself. Carefully. When his eyes meet hers again, she knows he won’t leave.

But he also clearly doesn’t intend to punish her. 

Ben pets a hand through her slick folds and groans. Even though he doesn’t need to, maybe especially because he doesn’t need to, he brings them to his lips and licks his fingers slowly before sliding them inside her.

She hasn’t been touched like this since her last heat.

His silence is so honest. It doesn’t blanket anything. He just touches her very carefully and spreads her open, stretches her out for him.

He’s not rutting, as much as she needs him to be, it’s nice to watch him take his time. 

“I’m sorry, I—I got carried away. You just...it felt like you didn’t want me.”

Ben shakes his head again, looking at her with a sort of harmless amusement that she never thought was possible. 

Rey bites her lips with a shaky breath and brings her knees up to her chest. She’s completely bare for him, in this nest of a uniform of a past life. The seal on her slick is broken. It’s flowing out of her, so much, and she doesn’t know where it ends. 

He bows attentively and laps it up. 

Her hips flinch up into his face, whispers apologizing for jostling him, but he just closes his eyes and focuses on swiping his tongue across her opening. 

_ There’s a plan here. No time for fun. _

“Can I—have your knot? Please?”

Her husband tilts his head for a moment like he needs to think about it. But there’s a warmth in his eyes.

Then he crosses his fingers again. 

Rey wraps her hand around his twisted fingers and whispers  _ yes. _

He nods finally with a patient expression she has seen a thousand times but only now realizes he is  _ patient _ with her. 

Yes. Knot.

The shiver of anticipation has less to do with the plan and more to do with the needs of her body. These things can run alongside each other as far as possible. But she will have to swerve eventually. 

Rey lets out a guttural moan when he sinks into her body and knows that this is all she can give them.

A head start. 

“Thank you,” she whines, “can we do this more? Please?”

Ben bites down on his lower lip and nods frantically, drawing back to pull out and slide back in to fill her  _ slowly. _

She smiles at him. Even if this isn’t really fixing things: she’s happy. It’s not bad. It is one thing hiding another, but that’s just pushing one truth to the back of the self instead of changing what it is in the mire of a lie. 

Ben smiles back and kisses her. 

“Mate me?”

No one asked her to do this. Even Ben looks surprised she would. This was not part of the plan. 

She just arches her throat and bites her lip. It’s not mindless heat yet. And the church considered marriage vows made in heat to be from an Omega of sound mind and body, which was a farce. Her hands wandered up and down Ben’s arms as he thrust, his pace faltering, uncertain.

“Please. I want it.”

Ben hums against her neck for a moment, kissing it hard, then tearing his mouth away guiltily. 

She strokes his back as he fucks into her. Slick is pouring out: his thrusts are so hard there’s splashes of it onto her inner thighs each time he bottoms out.

Fear flickers through her. That she misunderstands. 

“Don’t you want me?”

Ben’s body tenses up and suddenly searing hot pain floods the column of her throat from the force of his teeth. 

He did it. He marked her. He wanted her.

She lets out a choking sound when his teeth relax from the bite.

_ That’s how much. _

Her head swims. Feeling his jaws snap shut on her gland unlocks an ecstasy she’s never known before. She’s his. And he’s hers. God has nothing to do with it. 

She never had to give herself away entirely. But it just—made sense—like this.

Ben licks her blood from his lips, and in a fury above her, his knot locks into her. Hard. She whimpers in excitement just at the feeling: beyond every other reason tonight she needs this to happen. It just feels good now.

Rey can only think of the pulsing flow of his cum inside her when the pounding on the cabin door starts. Ben stirs, but whines, trapped by Rey’s cunt on the kitchen floor. 

Rey lets out a sigh of relief and then a pleasured whine. Heels digging into the carpet, the whole of her cunt twitching on his knot. It doesn’t stop feeling good. Being knotted by her mate. Her Alpha, for  _ forever _ now. 

When a superior yells through the door to tell Ben that two girls have run away: he’s not going anywhere to find them. Not for a long time. 

Ben’s eyes flicker down to his wife, blinking in sleepy confusion from the chaos and his own instincts. Cum is still flowing in shorts bursts, pumping into her yielding body. 

He’s been distracted by this for a while. And stuck like this for even longer still. 

She looks away when he seems to put it together how he ended up in a position where there's nothing he can do about the escapees. His weight on top of her turns bruising when she senses how trapped he feels.

It's penance. This awful time.

This is the right thing to do. Rose knows where her Alpha is: he’s close, he came here for her and left the address in a letter. She be better off. So will Bazine, who is going along because she can’t die here, not her, she just can’t. 

That was Rey’s condition to help Rose find her Alpha.

Because Rey is the bait.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every single time there is a song playing in this fic I want you to know it’s always “Dumb Blonde” by Dolly Parton


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: For “Suicide Mention” Rey has a flashback where she and Bazine discuss the suicide attempt of an author Bazine is recommending. If you’d like to skip it, it’s in a small section and the only time Bazine appears in the chapter so that’s your signal to just go to the next line break. 
> 
> “Eventual Pregnancy” has been lifted from the tags because one does not occur. I was on the fence about it and had tagged it to be safe for a potential trigger from the beginning but, to be frank, it wasn’t a thread I cared to follow anymore about halfway through and removed the tag once I was entirely sure. I did over-tag to be cautious of triggers so my apologies if that was misleading. 

In the process of convincing Rey that she did not do the right thing: execution is where it fails to connect to her apparently guilty soul. 

She’d noticed that before, the way guilt was used to press her down: convincing a person they would die and feel horrible pain only worked in as long as it took for them to avoid death’s glimpses. When it was in sight, near, it could make them as small and terrified as the person stirring up all the shame needed. And then feeling like one lost the attention of an incoming death took all the urgency of  _ goodness _ out of a person.

She certainly feels like she’s going to die from this. But when,  _ if _ she ever sidestepped it, wound down from this pain, would she believe it was her fault as she does now?

Her spine is arched on the infirmary bed, hands clinging to the leather straps that bind her wrists, eyes gliding down that partially untucked mesh screen that they didn’t bother covering her with. Her scent isn’t of their concern. Firstly, she’s mated. 

There’s only one Alpha to come close for her heat.

_ This is to teach her a lesson.  _

_It's awful._ She can’t even unclench her jaw from the pain. Her chest inflates with air and her lungs press it all out too quickly for her to fully taste the oxygen it drags in. She should relax, get comfortable, and have patience during all the waiting. Take this lesson, and learn it, and be sorry.

Even then Rey cannot convince herself she did the wrong thing. 

Instead she fights the presence of the bed, this room, and the eyes on her. She will not learn. The shame doesn’t settle. Just anger and more bitterness than she knows what to do with. And searing pain. Her body gasping to accommodate a knot that won’t come. Relief that will not be offered: and this again is the lesson in a lack of salvation. It feels like there’s no end in sight. 

Humans can create an accurate Hell, at least for an Omega. 

Rey’s breath hitches around a contraction in heat, her body seizing where it is tied on the bed. 

Bazine and Rose. Hopefully far away. Hopefully safe. What little faith she had in everything pushed them to the edge of this place and prayed that they soar.

A gentle hand grasps where the leather cuffs threaten to bruise her arms to hold her still. She fights off her tender. 

This would be so much more  _ bearable _ if she wasn’t being watched under the pretense of being cared for. 

Not by Paige. Paige is trying, with none of the instincts beyond familial, to track down her sister. 

Ben sits quietly in a chair in the infirmary next to her. Rey may not have been of sound mind by the time she was carried here, but she heard the order given to him by Father Skywalker that he not give in to his wife and mate no matter how much she begged. 

To teach them both a lesson. 

He gently dots a cool cloth over her brow, swallowing as he tends her neck. She sees blood on the terry-cloth, fuzzy and pink, from her fresh bite mark. The wound he left just days ago. A sob leaves her body because her mate is so near and he’s  _ torturing _ her. 

_ “Ben—” _ she tries, but he leans back in his chair with a whine. 

Rey doesn’t want to beg. She shuts her eyes and lets the tears fall down her face. Her mate is so  _ close.  _

“Please—” she gasps out,  _ “—you smell like heaven.” _

Ben’s fists tighten on the bedspread beside her. He shivers at the insinuation and shakes his head as if clearing a cloud from his mind. He’s her husband. What business does Luke have telling him what they should do?

_ Because Alpha is angry with you, and will never forgive you, and loves his church more than you. _

These instincts were hard enough without a guilt that sounded exactly like the voices that told her she was damned for her own mind.

She arches her hips with a hiccup and cries, though she should be unsurprised, that thrusting against nothing offers her no reprieve. This isn’t a sin. It’s her body: she can’t be free of her body.

Just as she feels his choice was made: she sees it. Through a glimpse, obscured by her thrashing, she looks over at him and sees something she’s never seen in Ben’s eyes.

Doubt.

He looks as if he questions  _ everything. _ Starting from long before he met her.

He buries his head in her lap and she can feel on her fevered skin that his lips move against her thigh in the act of prayer. She would touch him but her wrists are bound so she just lies there with his body folded over hers.

She knows how this ends. Ben will not give into temptation: no matter how he is led. And she will suffer and never forgive.

* * *

After days of this agony, she’s permitted a cold bath. 

By then her heat is gone enough for her mind to be sharp. Her body is sore and terrible. Ben helps her into the bath, a firm confidence in his body that wasn’t there when she was at her worst. Her heat had triggered his rut before. She supposes his miraculous self-control had something to do with it not happening again this time. He moves her slowly, with care, but there’s little that indicates lust towards her naked body.

And probably because he must hate her now. 

Her wrists and ankles are bruised, despite Ben constantly reaching for her to try and get her to lie back gently. These blue rings left by the leather straps weren’t uncommon to catch glimpses of on other girls in the dorms and lavatories after their heats, but the uniforms usually covered them with neat cuffs and thick stockings. When Ben gasps when the straps are unbuckled from her: she realizes it’s his first time seeing these marks on a person. 

She sits up and rubs the rawness of each arm with a thumb, avoiding a swollen, blistered chunk of her right wrist that was oozing and red. 

She ignores him as she settles into the tub. Her legs tremor in the cold water. 

He’s peeled her clothes off during two heats now, and seen flashes of her skin in their small cabin, but she’s fully naked in front of him. This is something between them that should have meaning and instead she sits like a good patient and he scrubs like a good nurse.

Heat lingers enough that if he were to drag her onto his cock right now she wouldn’t be opposed: despite the undercurrent of contempt and betrayal they both feel. 

She can tell from how he’s breathing that all she’d have to do was ask. Though maybe a lesson has settled in during her days tied down in the infirmary like a madwoman.

He’s her Alpha. He watched her like this and did nothing.

People said this was instincts: but to Rey it’s acute heartbreak. Ben’s hands patiently wash the sweat from her body and she knows she  _ must _ feel that she did the right thing because if she hadn’t then she’ll still never love again and it was for nothing.

Her chin presses to her knees as she starts to cry. 

Ben is silent as ever. He lifts her hair from her skin as she sobs. Ben’s carefully washing the bite he took from her neck. The bite that made Rey  _ his.  _ And it might be all her fault: but those first few days of being his were perhaps the cruelest way to spend learning she’ll never belong to herself again. 

She broke his heart first. Or maybe he was broken before she met him. But all his lovely pieces were dear to her in some odd way. And now that’s all over. 

He blots the mark carefully with a cool cloth. She’s surprised he can even look at it. She was a prisoner who trapped him back. 

Her throat throbs with the wound that will never heal, the one that says she shouldn’t ever be alone. She has a mate. 

Her eyes have not been able to meet his since that knock on the door to tell him the two girls had run. She can’t look at him when the mindlessness of heat gives way to anger. 

“I suppose it’s like this, then? Every time, I’ll just suffer here because I just don’t deserve you anymore.”

She can’t keep the venom off her tongue, maybe sharpened because she did what she had to do to rescue her friends, but that meant doing something else. She hurt him first. She hurt first. 

But he’s the Alpha. He’s supposed to take care of them. He’s supposed to take this subordination and fuck it out of her because she’s his to do with as he pleases. 

He is the Alpha, stilled by a priest and a  _ Beta _ at that. Rey likes to make herself a stranger to her instincts when she can help it but the ordeal of the past few days…

_ Punish me with your cock. Make me obey for your knot.  _ These are not the thoughts of a civilized person but they are what she can cling to when nothing else makes sense in whatever lifetime she is now damned to. She knew the instincts that made it impossible to keep their hands off each other. She trusted them more than she cared to admit before they didn’t work. He chose to obey the convent over his instincts.

There’s an angry breath over her shoulder. 

Ben grasps her arm above the elbow, hard enough to have her gasp. His fingers dig into her flesh. She squirms defiantly in the tub, trying to wrench out of his grip, but he carefully avoids her bruises to guide her hand to his groin. 

She swallows, her throat dry from screaming. He’s so hard that it’s like taking a look at a fine meal that he just dashed off the table and into the dirt. What a waste of a good thing to consume. For someone who had been hungry for most of her life: the biggest sin of them all. 

She glares at him. 

_ “What—” _

His hand squeezes around hers and she feels it through his trousers. At her touch, a knot surges up at the contact. Ready for her immediately. It strikes her palm with a violence that startles her, while she can’t pull her arm free from his grasp, her knees draw up to her chest defensively in the tub. 

Ben holds her steady, thrusting unconsciously into her hand, and then points out the window towards the chapel in the distance. 

Rey tries to consider anything other than the stickiness under her fingers and his smell. It takes some focus to do so: many blinking minutes of silence as she sits in the tub and he breathes unevenly.

_ The chapel. _ It pierces through her bitterness. Where he goes when he ruts: something that he prevented by a hair's breadth while she was writhing and begging in front of him. Because his priest told him not to touch her. 

_ Because… _

Because that’s where he  _ goes _ when he ruts. He gets tied up too. Something he is clearly fighting in this moment to be with her. He had to swear with whatever he had to swear with to be here. In this room with plenty of windows and nowhere to hide.

She doesn’t want to think that he’d do  _ anything _ for her after what she’s done. That he would try, in any way, to keep them from being separated. 

She didn’t  _ deserve— _

Rey rests her head down on his knee. He lets her hand fall away from his neglected cock, the wet spot from his knot spreading through his pants as far as where her brow touches his leg. His chest is rising and falling, cheeks flushed with shame. 

Ben is as powerless as she is. They can’t do anything. Haven’t been able to since Rey brought the convent to their door. If he knots her, they’ll be torn apart, no matter how unfair that is. 

He strokes her hair gently. 

“Ben,” she curls her hand around the back of his knee. The way he tries to catch his breath after a popped knot sounds like gasping, dry and raspy, but he nods in acknowledgement without lifting his head. “You don’t have to agree with what I did. But this place was killing them. And I think it’s killing us too.”

After a moment, he takes a deep inhale and bows his upper body over where she lies in his lap. Protecting her. Her limbs still quake as if withdrawing from a potent drug. Her need for him unfilled. 

Her husband cradles her head and nods with a soft hum. 

Relief floods her. She can’t stop the tears from falling, his thumb insistently works them away from her cheeks. And then, with his fingers flinching and faltering as if unsure, he touches his thumb to the knotted muscles drawn together between her brows. He touches them almost blindly, as if knowing they were there. Then, with halting strokes, he gently flattens the worry from her face.

There is such care in the gesture that it steals her breath. That her worries could matter to him at all.

With everything that seems broken: they have made a decision together and she won’t forget that they could. 

* * *

When they are allowed back into the cabin, Rey’s heat long gone and now only a lingering cold between them both, Ben retrieves her suitcase from where it was stored on a small shelf made from boards placed over the supports of the ceiling. 

She thought she’d never need it again. She’s almost afraid of the image of just her case for her to pack for herself, but Ben returns with a torn, army-issue duffle bag and places it on the bed beside her. His clothes get dumped into it in a heap.

Rey’s tongue is dry.

“You’re coming with me?” 

He lifts his head from where he tugs on the sticking zipper, confusion furrowing his brow. As if it were obvious. Tilting his head to the side, he gestures to his own neck, where hers is bandaged. 

Right. Neither of them could get that far from each other anymore.

The house is sparsely furnished, and she assumes most of it belongs to the convent, for what is a rotation of Alphas to fill Ben’s role. It makes her a little sad, slotting into this place to be with him, offered up as wholly and neatly as the spoons in the kitchen and the couches. 

What he owns, or at least what he wants to bring, scarcely fills that duffel bag. Rey thought her small time to pack from the dormitories before she married him was meager. Ben disassembles his presence from here in half the time. 

Ben goes to confession as Rey packs. 

She knows what he’s doing. And he had to inform Father Skywalker, in whatever way it seems like he does, of what’s happening. It’s not like she can resent it when they’re leaving already. Where they’re going is unclear, but honestly the mystery is better than the knowledge she has of this place. 

Still, something uneasy rolls around, unearthing a bed in her soul.

Rey goes out back to look over her garden. So many of the seeds are just starting to bloom. Something that made her so happy earlier this week to see. Now, through the same eyes, it saddens her.

In her own way, she changed this place. Maybe it’ll wither and die when the next caretaker comes. But she started something that makes her faintly sad to leave it. 

That lack of  _ nothing _ astounds her. Just her little garden. Like Bazine screaming as she ran around the dormitories, proving nothing but the fact that she existed. This was Rey’s scream. Something that Ben appreciated but had nothing to do with. 

He’s been gone a while. 

Her unease with Ben being at the chapel boils over, her readiness to leave is ripe, but what if the Father convinced Ben otherwise?

She never wanted to go back to that place. But she swallows her pride and wanders down the steps of the porch.

* * *

What she is doing is a sin: but Rey isn’t much for caring about sins anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time. 

She presses her ear quietly to the door of the occupied confessional and hears it.

The sound of faint crying. 

She kneels beside it, where Ben must be on the inside, pressing her hands to the door. The sun, from the open door of the chapel, is beating hot on her shoulders. It’s hard to hear over a rattle of grasshoppers out in the field. She’s not entirely sure she didn’t imagine the sound. But it’s unmistakable. 

He just weeps. 

Her body floods with guilt while she finally catches sight of Ben shaking in the dark through the grates. Hunched over. Ashamed. 

She threads her fingers instinctively around the metal, curling inside towards him, and the Father drones on and on about responsibility and  _ balance.  _

Ben takes a sharp sniff of the change in the air and glances at the door. Right at her. They stare for a moment through the grate. Ignoring the words of his priest as he keeps lecturing. He doesn’t wipe the tears from his eyes when she sees. He knows she’s there and he lets her look at him, into him, in this place he had gone to confess.

The other confessional door clatters open.

“This is between a man and his—”

Rey crawls back as Ben’s door opens just as swiftly, shielding her from Father Skywalker. His defense of her shocks her. 

Ben pushes the priest away and rests her head in his lap. He doesn’t do anything about his tears. He just holds her and lets her cry too. 

“I’m sorry,” she says softly against his knee, and Ben shakes his head and presses a kiss to her brow. Touch is searing for them both. Catching each other’s scent is almost too painful. They’re both skittish and weak from the heat spent mostly observing an order of chastity. It was like a knife stuck into both of them. There’s too much pain in the wound to feel any bitter poison in it. 

And he forgives her with his lips christening her skin. 

It finally feels like they’re really leaving this place. To a world where there’s music and milkshakes and gardens. 

This is between them now.

* * *

  
  


They load their bags into the truck with an audience. The priest. The General Superior. And about every other face in the convent pressed against the windows inside the dormitories. 

Father Skywalker’s goodbye is as acerbic as ever:

“God will forgive you. Paige probably won’t.”

Paige had left the morning after Rose. To go and find her. It would be too late to bring her back to the convent. And much too late, if all went according to plan, to take her from her Alpha.

Holdo addresses Rey directly for the first time since she and Ben were married:

“This was all in place to protect you.”

Rey breathes through her nose and nods after a moment. 

“In disobeying you, I have hurt myself many times. But those are my choices to make. More than vows we were forced into because we had nowhere else to go. Expecting obedience isn’t charity.”

Holdo blinks at her, her shoulders caving slightly at the force of the words. 

Ben threads his hand in Reys and guides her away. She knows why he’s leaving, but there is a way that he herds her into the car, gently but deliberately, that makes her feel like he’s preventing her from doing any more damage. 

* * *

She falls asleep with her head in his lap. 

It’s not on purpose. She’s tired, every muscle is burning from the days fighting her restraints. Exhausting lands a heavy blow and she’s knocked out onto his shoulder, then at some point if shifts to her head on his thigh as he drives.

There was cloud-muted sunlight in the sky when she fell asleep but it’s pitch black when she wakes up. 

Rey is too frightened to lift her head from his leg straight away. They must have been driving for a long time while she was out. He seems to know where they’re going: they’ve passed churches, hospitals, and hotels. So it’s not a functional refuge they seek. Where he takes them. It’s somewhere deliberate, and far. 

Ben’s hand rests comfortably on her neck. Over the bite. As she slept, the wound must have seeped, because his skin is sticky on hers and he doesn’t remove it. 

This is enough to wake her up.

She plucks a napkin off the floor and shakes his hand off to blot it clean. While she does this, she blinks the sleep from her eyes and tries to at least see what kind of civilization surrounds them. But it’s as unidentifiable as any other town. Garage. Scattering of homes. Grocery store. 

She tenses and stretches as well as she can on the bench seat and a warm feeling makes her choke on her first conscious breath. Even though her heat is over, it’s clear her body reacted to Ben’s in ways that are...obvious.

Something about her slick surprises her: it’s easing smoothly from her body into her underwear when her thighs move from where they curled to her body in sleep. It’s odd to feel arousal not hit her hard, like it does during her heat, and not as a force of someone else’s will from outside of her; but like a candle slowly glowing from her insides warming her up. It’s her fire. She’s not sure what to do with it. 

Part of her wants to pluck his hand from the steering wheel of the truck and guide it between her legs.

She closes her eyes and can’t help the groan of deep shame that overflows from her throat. That would go over well. After the last time she tried to seduce him, he’d probably leave her on the side of the road in the middle of the night if she tried to convince him to touch her.

If Ben recognizes the feeling behind her noises, he doesn’t show it in the way he gently pats her shoulder. She decides to just let this be pathetic and patronizing, her whines on his knee, and rolls onto her back on the seat to look up at him. His eyes are on the road. Focused, clearly a little too tired.

“Are we almost there?” she asks hopefully, not knowing where they’re even going. 

He glances down at her with a soft look in his eyes and nods. 

She’s glad. If there were much further to go, she’d make him stop for the night. 

But there’s a little bit of fear in his expression, as well, even though he’s trying to hide it from her. 

* * *

She finds herself on a stranger’s doorstep with Ben’s arm slung carefully around her shoulders. She doesn’t exactly have high hopes in the way his body almost shields hers. But she supposes even if it's a bad place, it’s possibly the only place he could take them from the convent. 

It’s very late. Even Rey holds her breath when he knocks on the door because it feels like such an awful thing to do in the middle of the night. No one would respond to that knock peacefully. At best they would be very afraid. 

Should they be? For them, and this mess they’re in?

Rey sees the fluffy folds of a bathrobe float around through the frosted panes that line the door: a figure crossing the room to a lamp, and then turning the lock. Very close. 

An older woman answers, her silver hair swept up in curlers, her eyes squinting at the outside security light cast over Ben’s shoulder. 

“Ben,” she says quietly, “you’re home.”

It’s as if Rey is an afterthought as the woman sweeps aside to let them into the house. Ben manages both of their bags and Rey’s hand in his grasp. She feels the too-plush carpet under her feet. Glances around the room. There’s a photograph of a boy with black hair and a close-mouthed smile mounted on the fireplace mantle. His dark eyes are Ben’s. For a moment she assumes he has a younger brother, but then realizes what is more likely from the resemblance is that this boy is her husband now. 

Ben drops her hand to offer a courteous, brief hug to the woman in the bathrobe. 

After a few deceptively sleepy blinks, the woman turns her eyes to Rey.

“Who is this?”

Rey nearly stumbles on the soft carpet under her feet. It doesn’t feel real enough. 

“I’m his wife. I’m Rey.”

Because both are said, Rey can’t tell which statement is more offensive than the other. She offers her hand and wonders if she should hug instead. 

“Leia,” is the clipped, slightly raspy answer. This is all a surprise to Ben’s mother. No one told her. And even that is an assumption Rey makes through observation.

Leia swallows, blinking from Rey to Ben. Then Rey feels a heat on her neck, almost trapped there by Leia’s eyes, at her bitten gland. Not just a wife. Mate. Omega. 

There’s a lot of story that Leia seems to wring out of them from one look. 

She swats Ben’s arm, clearly making a joke, “no more surprises from you. As your mother I can’t take any more shock.”

Ben bows sheepishly and shrugs after a minute. Rey hadn’t exactly anticipated this day, but it’s decidedly unremarkable and painfully awkward. 

Leia pivots and turns on a light in the kitchen.

“I’m sure the version I’ll get out of Luke won’t be very charitable, even if he is a priest. I can’t say any mother wants to be woken up at three in the morning to learn her son has gotten married, but if it’s the price I pay for grandchildren, I suppose I’ll welcome you into my home. Come and eat something.”

Rey gulps and tails Ben, who is moving quite eagerly, into the small kitchen. He settles himself naturally into a chair, it’s all familiar to him here. Rey hovers in the doorway. Wanting sleep as a means to disappear. 

In a few moments Ben is shoveling food into his mouth as Rey blinks at the absurdity of her life. 

Leia leans back against the fridge and looks Rey over with her arms crossed. 

“I’m not sure which one of us has more questions.”

* * *

  
  


The first night sleep is a relief, sagging into the bed that she is at least permitted to share with Ben. Leia throws out a half-question about maybe giving them separate bedrooms, but Ben’s arm closes around Rey and he huffs at his mother with a glare. So she merely raises a sardonic brow and flicks on the light to a guest room. 

But sleep is difficult in this strange place. What aggravates it is Ben doesn’t seem to be asleep either. Both of them lying too still just to be polite. It spooks her.

_ Relax, Ben. _

She wants to find his brow and smooth the worry she can practically hear but she’s nervous of poking his eyes in the dark.

She pats his arm, haltingly, awkwardly, and returns her hand to her side of the bed when he sighs.

Then they lie in the dark. Awake.

* * *

It’s hard to know what to expect about this new place: but meeting Ben’s family had a haunting quality, a tragic story, that at least made Rey think there would start to be sense in all this. Questions answered.

Despite knowing Rey must have questions, and knowing Rey has been living with a mute husband, Leia is very tight-lipped in the early days. Ben melts into a casual existence, almost reverting to a large teenager, eating and sleeping and lazing around the house. Rey at least doesn’t want to be in the way, but doesn’t want to be withdrawn and rude towards Leia’s hospitality. Leia is at least honest that Ben’s lumbering presence starts to annoy her for a week, and she orders him over to a neighbor—Lando’s—to help him out. 

That service to a family friend seems to be Ben’s role here. From what little Rey can parse out, it’s similar work to what he did at the convent, Lando understands his muteness and is sympathetic to it. Every once in a while Leia will load up a large basket with food and walk Rey down the street to Lando’s lush gardens, where Ben will be digging a pond or ripping up an old flower bed. 

Lando is chatty. So much so you don’t hear Ben’s silence. It’s almost an adapted kindness. He speaks for Ben but it’s intimate. 

“I’m personally not one for the heat, but Ben? Thrives in it. Never gets too hot. Could be out here all day. I tell him to come inside and have a drink and he waves me off. I love this kid. Glad he could help me out.”

It’s like going to Lando’s fills the need for conversation for the day, Leia will retrieve Rey from where she holds herself at a polite enough distance to smile and nod and listen and to also watch Ben work. Her throat itches when she loses sight of him: it’s like she needs to know he’s close. Now that he’s her mate. 

After lunch Leia will walk home with her and it’s...quiet. Not silent. Polite and mild. But pointedly quiet. 

Even Rey, who doesn’t really want to concern herself with anything other than how her stomach rumbles with constant hunger these days, and not for food, breaks on a walk home after a few weeks of this being-too-polite-to-ask nonsense.

“How long have you known Lando?”

Leia looks up over the rim of her sunglasses.

“Han’s best friend for longer than I knew Han.”

“Han is...Ben’s father?”

“Yes, yes, so Lando kind of came along with the whole set. Whole band of rogues. Personally Lando is easiest to deal with.”

“What happened to Han?”

Leia grumbles to herself as she opens the door to her home. 

“Heart attack. Of course he took every easy way out in life along with him.”

* * *

Maybe it’s because his mother is around, maybe that’s why it’s gone, but Rey feels the absence of his touch like a winter chill. She tugs a sweater around her shoulders when she wakes without it every day to try to keep its loss from making her cold. 

This is an odd place to be. Omega to an Alpha living with his mother. 

Her mark heals in the weeks that pass, that’s really the only sign of change or progress. Ben comes home looking like he did at the cabin. She can tell that calms him. Working outside. Distracting him. 

She doesn’t want to touch him if she hurt him so badly the last time she did. She’d rather feel like her touch could mean something and never use it, then use it and find he had no use for it anymore. 

But as summer slowly fades away and things get cold: she feels it.

How he won’t.

* * *

Time doesn’t pass: it evaporates. The passage of it is so murky that it’s impossible to track. Both Rey and Ben are in such a cloud they don’t notice it, don’t really notice each other, but it’s like not having to think about the next breath that they know the other is there. Trapped perhaps, but still there. They don’t examine it: their bond runs like an organ deep inside, that they don’t know when it will fail until it ruptures.

There has been enough disaster that Rey should be more aware of this organ, this body, but it’s a hard lesson she resists learning.

The days at Leia’s blended so neatly that it managed to sneak up on her. 

One morning Rey feels one ominous quake down the muscles of her thighs. 

Her hand grips the edge of the counter and there’s a surprised moan from low in her belly. The kitchen resonates with the sound, and it’s still echoing by the time Rey bends over from the shock with her head almost between her knees.

Luckily Leia’s out shopping and the house is empty. It’s raining, so he wouldn’t be able to go to Lando’s to work, so Ben must have gone with her. 

It snuck up on them both then. Angry or not, he’d most likely be clinging to her like a fly to honey if he sensed Rey was  _ this _ close. She’d been listless for a few days, perhaps a little achey, but it was hard to separate what her body was longing for on her heat cycle from what it was longing for every day. 

She sucks in her breath between her teeth and tries to remain focused. Should she go back upstairs and nest in the bed they barely share with each other? Leia wouldn’t entirely know what she was smelling if Rey was careful and kept to one room: Ben would know by the time the car was parked. That felt like enough. 

But she can’t go upstairs. She stares at the braided pattern of the kitchen rug. Upstairs to a bed, with metal bars on it—

Her last heat was painful enough. 

Rey seats down in a heap under the sink. The pain in her body is distracting, it has her legs twisting and fidgeting. There’s supposed to be a voice that tells her what to do. A voice that says  _ Alpha will provide for you. _

But if she goes upstairs to be left to squirm out her heat under his watchful, detached eye again, there’s no point in placing her faith there. 

She doesn’t know how long she sits there and waits, unable to know what to do with herself, until she hears a car move down the road. 

She shoots to her feet with her heart pounding. It’s not the truck. It’s an old Cadillac that slips past the windows as if unaware of her existence. But if Ben were home, this would be settled. However he was going to handle it. 

Rey swallows. Her throat feels hot and dry. That’s not quite her heat, though that dehydrates her body a little bit, but a bit of anxiety. She gasps in air all at once: breathing is harder to remember to do. It’s like a fever, where if she doesn’t connect why she feels so awful from lack of breath, she won’t remember to take one.

She should have had a better plan for this. Instead, after last time, she was just grateful it was over. Until it began again. Unprepared. Like every time this year.

She can’t be angry at Ben. This is her fault she feels this way. Her actions made it impossible to trust each other. He put his trust in his relationship with his priest, who told him he’d separate them if he took her again, so Ben didn’t have a choice—

It hurts too much to think about. 

She heaves out a deep breath as if to exhale the memory out of her gaping mouth. Honestly, even with the thought temporarily cast aside, she feels sick. 

It’s every Omega’s worst fear. Ben can resist her when she’s like this: and he can avoid giving her what it feels like is all she needs. It’s crushing. Crippling. Terror tenses every muscle of her body. She can imagine him walking right in now, restraining her, disapproval thinning Leia’s lips as he locks her up until she can behave. 

The sound of one car is enough to frighten her. She doesn’t wait for another, for the one carrying her Alpha home, to make her escape. 

* * *

  
  


Rey doesn’t go far. She doesn’t intend to run away forever. That’s ineffectual with an Alpha, especially a mated one. Especially Ben. Even if he doesn’t like her, he’d still have to hunt her down, and quite capably at that. The minute he caught her scent on the kitchen rug would be where her journey ended.

It’s not so much distance as it is  _ space. _ The outside air feels right on her lungs. Meant to be. Even if it means being hunted. There’s a thrill when at least it’s not scrabbling at the walls of a prison. That she can be traced through fresh air. 

It feels like nature bears witness to the instincts it created. 

Her stomach feels better with a cool breeze against her skin. The heat isn’t so stifling: maybe it was like those cases where underfed or weak Omegas felt every contraction and wave more acutely because there was so little to absorb each shock. Being stuck in a house made her more susceptible to the abnormal, the unnatural. Despite being folded over in pain on the kitchen floor; a few steps across the grass in fresh air and she’s able to run.

She slips down a muddy incline behind the house, intent to reach the creek that wove through the back pasture, and from there jogs over to the abandoned barn. 

Mud coats her bare legs. There’s so much bright light from the sun, so many flowers, so much she wants to explore. But there isn’t much time until Leia and Ben get home. She keeps her pace brisk. 

It’s secluded enough to muddle her scent across the property. Carrying it in varying directions like the seeds of a dandelion. 

The barn is duty and untouched on the inside. There’s a car parked pathetically close to a slouching wall: a mere breath away from the rotting wood that made it clear it was parked inside to never be moved. It’s a piece of junk. But that’s not what an Omega sees. Warm and dry. The bench seat at the back has plenty of room for Rey to curl up. Enclosed, unblemished, a perfect place to hide.

Already her mind, frantic to make a nest, urges her to take shelter there on the upholstery. 

She’s clawing the door open and climbing inside without a second thought.

Rey knows when she plants her cheek on the seat, knees to her chest, that this behavior is not normal. Nor was what happened in the kitchen. There are obvious fears attached to heats: that the pain will never stop, that an Alpha won’t come, that she can’t be helped. But this runs deeper. It guts her. It is not that her heat will not be seen to, but that it feels like nothing will ever be okay, beyond what an Alpha can do to help her. 

There are things too painful for Rey to admit to herself. There have been her whole life. Every cheery-faced couple who came into the Orphanage, she didn’t even picture them as strangers as wanting her. She pictured her parents; scooping her up and saying _ there-you-are _ and being sorry for leaving her and her forgiving them because they came back. Every time. And she kept doing it like nothing was learned when another child found their home. 

It is too painful to admit that even as she hides here from Ben, she wants Ben, she wants him to find her, and the fact he might not want her anymore is so horrible that she will stay here and hope heat passes in its entirety before he finds her.

Another agonizing wave is rollicking through the space between her hips. She chews on the nail of her thumb and tenses her jaw to try and ride it out. 

At least she’s not tied up. She can fight and kick and shake as much as she needs. But even that doesn’t come from her body. It’s very still. And that scares her. 

Her face buries into her knees. Curling up very small. And she waits. 

So used to waiting.

* * *

_ “You should read that one next.”  _

Rey’s on her bed at the convent, squinting dubiously at the book Bazine is waving temptingly in her face.

“I’ve had enough of your dirty books,” Rey says, “and that’s not because of my purity: they’re just so boring.”

Bazine is so pleased with her own highly stylized sense of taste that she takes no offense. She snickers, but keeps holding the book out.

“It’s good. You should read it.”

Rey rolls her eyes and takes it, paging through it, though disinterest glazes her eyes. Such was the ritual of female-ness she had never really known, with these novices and their closely-hoarded things.  _ You have to read this. You have to try this. You have to wear this.  _

All of these things foisted on one another to leave a mark of some kind. Shut up here they are already dead to society, to history, so if Rose is wearing a light pink lipstick suggested to her that the older, blinder Superiors can’t see at supper, then at least some great impact is made. Rey already had so many conflicting emotions foisted upon her in this place, none feeling like her own, that there was a glossy sheen like plastic wrap that covered all she consumed from them. Not letting it touch her. 

Bazine rolls onto her stomach, perking up with a purpose. Rey eyes her with a bored annoyance. 

“You know how some animals know when it’s their time?”

It’s said like it has anything to do with the book. Rey tried to attach it back to what they were already talking about, but it’s so abrupt she finds it turns her around instead. 

But she knew. There was an old cat at the orphanage. There was a day it stopped lurking around the yard where the children played, and then days later they found it curled up sweetly in a planter of dead flowers. Like it had known exactly where to lay down. 

“Yes,” she says, looking out the window. 

The Alpha was out at the courtyard with a wheelbarrow. She watches him move with the intense precision. His black hair is tucked behind his ears in the heat: from the open window there’s a breeze that Rey has to hold her breath for because his scent will carry.

Bazine looks over the back cover of the book.

“So the author of this book saw the family dog crawl under the porch to die. Because it knew. And then one day, she crawled under the porch too, and that was where they found her.”

Rey tilts her cheek to her quilt and looks carefully at Bazine.

“Was she dead?”

Her roommate shakes her head. 

“No. It was before she wrote the book. They found her curled up there, and then she was sent to a hospital.  _ Then _ she wrote the book.”

Rey blinks at this. She doesn’t even know what the book is about: but that doesn’t seem to matter to Bazine either. 

“So it actually wasn’t her time?”

There’s a terse silence between them. She can feel it in the flow of energy that always comes from that side of her bed. Bazine wanting to say  _ no _ because Rey had said something she hadn’t thought of and didn’t want to agree. Bazine wanting to say  _ yes _ because it was true. 

_ “I guess not.” _

* * *

Rey blinks when a large, cool hand covers her sweaty forehead. She thought she was in the dormitory. Bazine felt real enough to touch. From Rey’s estimation, she should have been right there in the front seat. Close enough to touch. But when she reaches for her, it’s empty. 

Rey wants her sisters.

There’s a breath against her neck. 

Ben is slowly pulling her out of the broken-down car in the barn. His face is drawn with a tension that is not anger, not fear, but a mix of both that is doused over something that makes her sad. Her thighs twitch once she’s in his arms. She couldn’t have been her long. But it feels like years. 

The scent of him makes her want to cry. 

“Alpha,” she hiccups against his neck, “please…”

There’s a meekness in her voice she doesn’t like. Pure need. But it’s not that of a demanding child, it’s so much more hopeless than that. It’s the kind of voice she heard in the orphanage. Soft and weepy. 

Her husband makes a little grunt as he lifts her up off the seat. 

He strokes her back very gently. He’s carrying her. Everything should point to her Alpha feeling safe and capable. But it just weighs her down like dread.

_ Ben isn’t cruel. Last time he was trying to be with you even if it hurt you both, rather than abandon you… _

There’s no sense to be made of how she feels. How lost at sea her mind if, even if her body is aloft in his arms. 

She buries her face in his shoulder as he eases them through the kitchen door. 

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

Ben shakes his head as if he could answer his mother and instead was choosing not to. He carries Rey through the room, but tugs the refrigerator door open and merely points to the ice inside. Leia’s lips thin from concern, not judgement, and she follows Ben’s instructions as he continues on with Rey towards the stairs. Rey can faintly hear Leia filling a bowl with ice.

“Does Rey need to go to a hospital?”

_ Here we go. Tied up again. _

Betas don’t understand. They never do. Not what Rey needs.

Ben’s patient eyes on hers promise that he knows. 

She can’t process her surroundings outside of a pain that is like the echoing silence following an unheard scream. Just that nothingness answering her. Then she’s on the bed. 

Ben’s face is drawn as he takes a washrag and the ice from Leia and then ushers his mother out and shuts the door. Rey should be ashamed, but she only feels fear, to be tended like this is a medical problem, nursed, and not  _ claimed. _ She writhes on the bed and scratches her hot gland. It’s like a fever that needs to break, is so close to breaking, under a bundle of blankets that can’t be hot enough yet. 

Ben sets his knee on the mattress beside her hip and dots her sweaty brow with the ice. She whimpers: unable to ask. If he said no, she’d burst into dust. She would dissolve. She’s his, and if he can’t want her, even like this, it’s the end. 

Ben takes a few calming breaths, not for her, but clearly to calm himself. Concern lines every curve of his face. 

After a pause to watch her prone body squirm and gasp, he held up two crossed fingers again. Knot. 

Instead of answering, which would be begging, Rey arches up off the bed they had yet to christen and sucks his fingers into her mouth.

His eyes go black. She can tell from every chorded muscle that he will restrain himself until she tells him Yes. But it’s a struggle. She sucks pensively on his fingers, getting them wet, feeling her cunt mirror the drip from her stretching jaw.

When they’re wet, she nods. Frantically. 

He closes his eyes. Doesn’t move. Takes a deep breath through his nose. 

Then he’s on her like he never stopped wanting her. 

* * *

  
  


It’s not as if every heat they’ve shared has been ideal. It’s not nearly as bad as their first as a married pair, and nowhere near as destructive to their direction of their lives as the first time they were together. 

However, something’s...wrong, and they both know it without having to speak.

Rey can’t stop weeping. She doesn’t want to cry, but she can’t stop. The slip down her cheeks and big choking sobs leave her throat whenever he thrusts. It feels good, it’s exactly what she wants, better than perhaps she deserves. But something deeper than her mind has her body responding in odd ways, her teeth practically chattering, and Ben keeps flinching back in concern. 

She clutches his face when he pulls away.

“Please, I don’t know what’s happening. But I’m fine. Don't leave.”

His eyes narrow in confusion and he crawls back over her again. 

His response whenever she drags him back with a desperate plea by his ears or hair is to always go slower, softer; so he presses his lips to her breast and mouths at her nipple before he’s inside her again. They’ve been at it for hours, only now able to notice the oddness enough to respond to it after working out how badly their bodies need each other.

“Perfect knot,” she praises hollowly, her body and mind disconnected and only one in agreement with her words, “perfect Alpha.” 

It’s not as if Rey doesn’t understand that how he found her is—concerning. 

She can’t explain how she wound up there either. Curled up in an abandoned car, waiting for the end. She  _ wasn’t _ going to die. Her lungs seize in defiance of this with every steady thrust he presses inside her. She was merely in heat, it was like an injection of vitality a human body was overwhelmed by, and her Alpha is fucking her now. It is the opposite of death, if maybe faced in the same direction of it. 

He looks just as lost as she feels, her doom baffling herself as much as it clearly does him. 

Rey threads her arms around his neck and pulls him down, close, trying to bury herself. 

“I just didn’t think you were coming for me.”

* * *

Ben makes up for lost touch when they rest. His hands in her hair. She’s not sure if he sleeps, because his eyes are on her constantly. Whenever she’s awake he watches. 

Sometimes she kicks against him softly in sleep and startles herself awake to knock against his solid body. He soothes her and strokes her back: if she is still tired she just falls right back asleep and if she needs him she just pulls him close and he takes the hint. 

This is the only thing that makes sense between them, even if it’s ruined. The husk of a once-great colosseum that is studied only by those who study ancient and dead things. It has no place in the world they live in, but it’s known.

Blame is something that she’s had a difficult relationship with because it was so close to guilt. It was what distributed the weight of regret. 

Maybe this is how it will always be. Instincts will make this possible between them each time it happens. Any other moment they’ll just be strangers. 

Rey broke them. She broke herself. 

Ben keeps calm. Ben stays steady. He just doesn’t leave her and cuddles her and gives her everything she needs with his knot. There’s nothing between them now. 

So why does it feel like there’s a distance that can never be crossed?

Their nest is disturbed some days later. They had gone still for long enough that even a Beta could understand that things were done. They wake with a rough, uncompromising knock on the door:

“If you two are finished, I want Rey to see a doctor.”

* * *

  
  


Ben paces in the pea-green hallway of the hospital. The setting clearly unnerves him. Rey fills out her own paperwork to the best of her abilities, but she sees Leia eying all the lines she leaves blank because she doesn’t know. 

_ Family history  _ is one long, blank expanse. 

From all the concerned looks, Rey wonders vaguely if she will be institutionalized. She’d heard threats of this for the truly unruly, untamable Omegas. 

_ Catholic Orphanage. Catholic Nunnery. Catholic Sanitarium. _

It seemed like a perfect trinity. 

Maybe she should start making some things up from the perfectly healthy family she came from, or else she will get sent away.

Leia clears her throat, as if Rey’s lack of written response is merely nerves. 

“Harter is an old friend. She’ll take care of you.”

Rey swallows and looks down at her forms. Some boxes, personal ones, that she must tick begin to paint a picture of why Leia insisted she be brought in.

_ Have you experienced anxiety regarding your latest heat? _

_ Has your heat coincided with a time of emotional distress?  _

_ Are you Mated? If Yes, have you had adequate access to your Mate during your heat cycle? _

A door opens beside Ben and he flinches sideways like a frightened dog. The doctor that steps out of the room is calm and unflappable from his scurrying away, she sets a warm but clinical smile towards the waiting room where Leia and Rey sit. 

“Rey Solo?”

Rey perks up to hear her married name. It’s an odd mix of strangeness and sense-making. 

Her doctor crosses her arms around the clipboard she has, hugging it to her chest. “And since you’re a mated Omega, your husband will need to be present.”

Ben gives a shiver from the shadow behind the open door, his place down the hall obscured by it. 

Rey swallows and stands up. 

“Leia, can you come in with us?” 

She’s not sure why she asks for a witness. Maybe because her husband looks so frightened. It’s also because Rey can’t answer for him if there’s a question because there’s so much she doesn’t know. Rey doesn't want to make her mother-in-law uncomfortable, but she needs someone else to speak to the doctor, and to herself, who may be able to help.

Some of Leia’s steeliness softens in that moment. Her tone is clipped, but gracious.

“Of course.” 

* * *

Ben faces the wall in the small room. Rey is seated on a paper-covered table in a gown, and he stands near as if attending to her, but she sees his eyes. He bounces his knee and faces the wall. 

She reaches out and grasps his hand. He gives her an expression like  _ she’s _ suffering, his mouth an apologetic, grim line, and she squeezes comfortingly. 

Dr. Kalonia presses a stethoscope to Rey’s belly and pelvis. It’s unclear what she’s looking for. 

“Your mother-in-law suggested you come here regarding some issues with your previous heat?”

Rey licks her lips and glances guilty at Ben. His eyes have left the wall and bear into hers, insistent, as if to tell her it was alright to be honest. 

“I don’t really know what happened. It was coming, and I felt—so horrible. The bond is supposed to open up complete trust and understanding. But instead I felt like—I was dying.”

There’s the press of the stethoscope, less bracing because it was warmed from her skin, against her neck. 

“Have you two considered any therapies to help with communication, considering Ben is nonverbal?”

Rey flinches defensively. She doesn’t need to volunteer Ben to be experimented on. She can understand him. Usually. The little things. When he’s hungry and tired. When he’s stressed or scared, like now. 

Clearly this office is terrifying him.

“No, I didn’t know there were any.”

“There’s a wonderful school for the deaf a few miles from here, but they take on cases of language acquisition at all ages.”

“Yes,” Leia replies for Rey, “I have done my research when looking for options for Ben.”

Her tone is oddly grave. 

Dr. Kalonia nods as if remembering. 

Rey blinks between her mother-in-law and this old friend. Ben’s head is bowed like he doesn’t want to be listening. So much so that he draws closer to her and begins tracing his fingers distractedly over her leg. 

Rey grasps his wrist, not stilling it, but only to trace her thumb in circles on his skin.

Her doctor returns her attention to the Omega in the room.

“Were there circumstances surrounding your previous heat that could have caused some sort of psychological distress?”

Rey bites her lip and shrugs. 

Ben’s eyes squeeze shut and he nods.

Leia sits up in her chair across the room.

“Ben, what happened?”

He takes a shaky breath and then shrugs. Rey bows her chin to her chest. The distance between them burns like fire, and his agitation is gasoline. It feels like the farther they get, the more damage is done. 

Rey presses all of her simple faith into that this means they are better together, and surprises even herself by putting her arms around Ben. 

He steps into her touch readily. It’s a little awkward to be cuddling him in front of his mother and her doctor, but the rush of calm that fills her pushes that discomfort away.

“We mated at the start of my last heat. But I got him into trouble with the convent, as sort of...it’s hard to explain. Two girls escaped. I knew they were going. I thought it was the right thing to do. I had to keep Ben from hunting them down, and I…”

She trails off when she sees the conflict on Leia’s face. A mix of shock, discomfort, horror, and pity.

“But then the convent punished him for it and he wasn’t allowed...to see me through.”

Dr. Kalonia clicks her tongue like that makes sense.

“Mated Omegas sometimes experience an intense psychological drop if they are left alone during their heats. It can make the next occurring heat a deeply traumatic experience. After the war we saw this exact thing very frequently, when Alphas went overseas and left their mates at home, with the suppressant rations and all that. Alphas used to be marked unfit for that reason, but we all know what happened when the other side had the advantage of training Alphas to fight”

It’s so casual, even in that understanding tone.

Ben breathes out, everything in his lungs, and puts his head in his hands. 

“But that’s not Ben’s fault,” Rey chooses honesty, because Ben’s shoulders are actually shaking. Her arms come around him to try and shield him. “He didn’t have a choice. I got him into trouble, and if he—if he tried to help me, Father Skywalker was going to separate us.”

She’s only focusing on Ben. On the obvious guilt that overwhelms him, filling the room too vast for them to swim between. In many ways this is the rift the priest wanted. Tearing them apart again and again: laid so deep that Rey’s psyche is apparently scarred from it. 

But something happens that pulls focus from even Ben’s despair. 

Leia lets out a noise like a knife had been driven into her gut. 

* * *

  
  


In the kitchen, Rey sees Leia do something she has never done and lights a cigarette. Rey had no idea she smoked. Though because she’s alone with her mother-in-law, Rey has a sense that this is not something Leia wants anyone to know.

Ben went out for a drive. 

He was very upset by the doctor’s visit, even though Rey feels relief by what’s happening to her—to them— having a name. And there’s a way to help it. 

It rises in her chest, wistfulness she didn’t know she was capable of anymore.

Even a way they can talk to each other, maybe, someday. 

Everyone else left with this sense of doom. But it feels more hopeful than that. 

Leia suggested he take a drive to cool off when they got home and he just...wouldn’t let go of the keys. To go for a drive and calm down a little. Looking at him, hearing his mother’s suggestion, it made sense. But it hurt Rey to see someone know Ben so well, tell him what to do to feel better, and have him do it. It felt like she’d never really know him again: not like that. Not enough to help him. 

“I send my son away to protect him and this is what happens.”

Leia never speaks to Rey. Not really. Other then  _ pass the salt _ and  _ it might rain today.  _ She’s not sure what Leia knows about Rey, maybe nothing at all, maybe something Ben had managed to communicate in all the ways she still can’t read him. Leia houses Rey, tolerates Rey, integrates Rey. But she doesn’t talk to Rey.

Maybe Ben was quiet for longer than he was mute. In this household, this soft-spoken, silent household, maybe he it wasn’t just that he couldn’t speak, it was that speaking was a different kind of act here. 

There’s only the light above the sink left on, the room sunken in quiet, morose darkness. This is a voice from Leia that Rey had only dreamed to hear, that of a concerned parent, of someone resigned to handle the problems the world sent adults. Children heard it muffled from their bedroom doors. But now that it addresses her, Rey is overwhelmed to learn she is an adult, a mirror of this devastation, and that she has to try and help. 

She clears her throat, only able to answer after a moment.

_ “What happened?” _

Leia focuses on the inhale from her cigarette.

“Father Luke Skywalker is my brother.” 

This takes a moment to sink in. Rey searches her mind for a distinction, any distinction, that the Father and Ben shared any blood. She couldn’t place it other than the slightly-knowing tone Luke adopted when Ben disappointed him. 

“I—had no idea—”

Leia shakes her head. 

“I doubt Luke would say much about it. Something about his vows discouraging him from forming attachments, or abandoning the ones that existed before. Ben wanted to be a priest like he was. Before, you know.”

Rey always was able to picture that. His careful hands, something stark about him, and his quiet, unshakeable faith. How he listened: like her words were bells that rang inside him. She often thought he’d be a good priest: part of the tragedy of his muteness was that it could never be. 

That it was a dream he had, and that it was dashed, burns as a quiet anger inside herself. Ben deserved his dreams. Instead he got  _ her.  _

“There were two devastating blows. Ben’s accident, but first was his father’s passing. Han died when he was fifteen. Ben was—difficult for me to handle, in his grief. So the options he was given were to clean up his act, or be sent away.”

Rey narrows her eyes, trying not to judge something she’s never had to face, but knowing what it’s like to be sent away makes this information blossom across her spirit like a bruise.

Even Leia falters at Rey’s dark expression, wetting her lips before returning the cigarette to her mouth.

“I’d heard about this Boy’s School, not remedial but definitely  _ authoritative, _ where they had promised to straighten him out. When I dropped him off, I didn’t know how much I would never know about what happened there.”

She flicks her ash into the sink.

“I didn't know I’d never hear his voice again.”

Rey has to bite her tongue from screaming it again and again, like rosary beads repeated on a thread:  _ what happened what happened what happened. _ But she feels like speaking will startle Leia back to remembering she doesn’t trust her son’s wife. 

“There was something in the woods, I think a camping trip. Something to turn the boys into men, that kind of mentality,” Leia shakes her head and then gives Rey a grave but vulnerable look, “I need you to understand. We will never know what happened.”

Rey nods even though it feels like signing over her last breath. 

“The story I was told was he was climbing a tree and he fell. Completely lost the ability to speak. The diagnosis is Aphasia, from head trauma, so something happened to my son.”

It is terrifying only in its vagueness. And Rey has only been told that this will never have an answer.

Leia doesn’t move a muscle but her distress is seen in every inch of her body. Like a rabbit tensing up knowing a predator lurks. It’s a bad kind of stillness. 

"I sent my son away, trusted that he'd be helped, and he comes back with a head injury and no one telling me the full story. Climbing trees? I don't think so."

Rey doesn’t feel her mother-in-law is telling this because Rey needs this information. Leia, it seems, seeks a confessor. 

How tragic that it isn’t Ben.

“I wouldn’t see him until it was long over. I was recently widowed, and I had sent my son somewhere I thought was safe, and now he comes home and can never speak to me again? I was desperate. Ashamed. Terrified for him. After Ben’s accident, I didn’t want to send him away to a school. Actually, no, I  _ did _ want to do that. I wanted him to be able to learn how to live a life like any other boy, in a place that understood him. But I had already sent him away, trusted him to the wrong people, once before. He didn’t want to go, he wanted to stay near the church. And what I really didn’t want was to force him to do something that he didn’t want to do. So he went to Luke. At least with _family,_ I thought. It was only supposed to be a few years. God was helping him where I couldn’t. Ben _wanted_ God to help him.”

Rey wants to say  _ it brought me to him. Now he’s mine. And I will take care of him. _

But she can’t.

“I trusted these men with my son and he keeps coming back home hurt.”

Rey had spent her life surrounded by people who believed in their own suffering. And she also spent it with girls who were smart enough to know what they deserved outside of their prison. Leia bowed to this grief, as if she didn’t obey it properly before. She speaks now like this was all meant to be very sad. Even for a moment, even if it was only while Ben couldn’t see

A deep breath falters on her tongue, like it’s grown butterfly wings and can’t escape her airways. Rey looks down at the counter and shivers for Ben, out driving through the night probably to feel free of them. 

“What was the name of the school that could help him?”

* * *

It’s obvious that night he doesn’t trust her cuddles, her sweet words, her lips on his neck trying to make him relax into bed with her. Rey has never had much practice being beguiling and even if tempting him to feel safe is a struggle. She lies against his back and spoons him on the bed.

He was out driving for many hours. He missed dinner, waved away the insistence of food, but didn’t deny Rey her presence at his side. Or in his bed. 

“Should we meet with the school?”

This feels unreal. This is talking to her husband and making a decision. It took so long to reach this point, so much too. Too much.

He cranes his neck to look down at her. Tries to. She’s practically strangling him, wrapped around his back and clinging, so he can barely move to do so. 

She presses her face into his shoulder so he can’t look at her.

“Should we try?”

It’s the last thing left for her to do, other than curl up on the seat of that abandoned car again and wait for her time.

She peeks when Ben pats her hands, which are tangled together by the fingers at the base of his throat. 

Even if he can’t see her looking, he nods as if he knows that she is. 

* * *

  
  


He’s so worried about their meeting that he doesn’t even notice Rey tries to make up for it by kissing him before he goes in for his appointment. It’s sloppy. She grabs him by the collar and plants one on him when his name is called and he stands. 

He responds with a pat on her waist like she needs soothing, not looking at her as he slips into the doctor’s office. It’s not like the hospital. It’s not sterile and full of sick people. It looks quite like an administrative office, with a receptionist in a fashionable dress and shiny wood panelling on the walls. 

It’s a frightening hour in that waiting room. She half expects this is the final straw: he’ll storm out of that room and pick her up over his shoulder and take her back to the convent. 

But when he finally comes out of that room, he goes to her chair and stands at her feet with enough tension in her body that she stands too. In a panic at first. At his feet again and reaching. 

And then, as if rewarding himself for surviving it, he kisses her too. 

It’s a sweet kiss, a punctuation and an insistence and a claiming: closed-mouthed a little hard. But it makes her feel claimed. 

It almost says  _ I did this for you _ and she knows how brave he was to do it. 

“Thank you, my Alpha,” she says only loud enough for him to hear, as he’s said so much only she can. 

A voice clears itself from a few yards away.

There’s a young woman —Ben’s doctor, Rey realizes— in an orange and yellow sweater dress waiting in the office.

“Mrs. Solo? I was hoping to have a chat with you as well for some of your options. Ben was alright with me doing so.”

He nods, checking her face for signs of nerves, but she’s more confused. Wasn’t this about Ben getting treatment? She was the Omega, she kept the bed warm no matter what he was doing.

“Of course,” she squeezes Ben’s arm and takes her turn inside the office.

The doctor closes the door behind her to expose a pretty, slightly-gapped smile. 

_ “Dr.—?” _

“Call me Jannah, and please, get comfortable.”

Rey obeys, but this feels like one of those offices she spent her whole life trying to avoid. For scoldings and punishments. She wishes Ben were here.

“Mrs. Solo,” she’s speaking clearly and slowly to her. “Your husband has given us written consent to disclose some of his medical records in order to help you understand. I’m a speech-language pathologist. I’m here to help assess his language skills.”

“He can read,” Rey says, her throat dry, “and write a little. He understands me. He’s not dumb.”

If her tone is too defensive: Jannah must be used to these conversations, because she doesn’t even flinch.

“No one is saying your husband is dumb. He has Aphasia from a traumatic brain injury. His fall badly damaged the part of his brain that controls his use of language. That doesn’t mean every function is affected on the same level. From my observations, he is completely mute?”

Rey tenses in her seat like a cat being drawn to a hot bath. 

“He can speak to me, in his way.”

The pathologist smiles kindly. Sadly. 

“I’ll do a more thorough assessment with Ben, but my question is if he speaks to you verbally?”

Her chest shudders with this examination.  _ They were doing fine. Can’t they just be left alone to live? _

“I’ve never heard him speak.”

Anyone who’s been in a room with Ben would say the same, except maybe his mother and Luke. And that was from a long time ago.

“The reason I'm asking these questions, Rey, is that the symptoms and language comprehension of Aphasia are different for every person. You haven’t been hiding anything that endangers him. We’re just trying to understand how his brain functions. As I’m sure you’ve learned in your time being married to Ben, you have to adapt to other people’s varying language skills. That goes for Aphasia, and for second language learners, or even vocabulary for speaking or writing with children growing their vocabulary.”

This has her head spinning and she is not sure why. Words were just something that fell out of her mouth. She wasn’t even sure she had the right ones.

“They didn’t teach me what words meant.” 

It falls out of her in a state of shock. Jannah hit against something Rey didn’t even know she kept inside. 

The doctor, the  _ pathologist,  _ blinks at her in surprise. 

Rey takes a steadying breath: “I was raised by nuns in an orphanage. They used a lot of big words. Like  _ temptation _ and  _ reconciliation. _ But they never...I didn’t feel like I understood them. Just feared them.”

“Well, think of this as a time to start over,” there’s a smile that seems genuinely excited for Rey, “because Ben might have to re-learn the alphabet, and so will you, when you two learn to sign.”

“What?”

“You’d be learning along with him. It’d be how you two communicate, if it’s effective. I’m also going to recommend you two enter into counseling—”

_ “If?” _ Rey’s heart sinks. “This might now even work?”

The pathologist withdraws her excitement a little bit to return to her more clinical tone.

“Being able to sign won’t solve everything,” Jannah agrees gently. “It might be just as difficult for Ben to grasp as spoken language currently. It’s all about what output his brain is capable of.”

Rey wants to scream. They want her to admit there’s something wrong with him. They can’t make him better. And it might be too wrong to make anything easier. 

“Then why are we doing all this? Ben and I are mated. We can speak as we please.”

“Because he just  _ might  _ be capable of it. And wouldn’t you like for Ben to express himself like anyone else, and give him the experience of being understood?”

Rey puts her hands on her knees, hunching over in the seat. 

It might not work. 

It might not be possible still. 

It might mean that, if it was, that there’s no hiding for her anymore.

* * *

  
  


When she gets into bed that night, there’s a note on her pillow. 

She has to scan through so many possibilities of who it could be from, until it hits her it is the most obvious, especially since Ben won’t even roll over to look at her. 

She bites her lip and flips it over to read it. It’s a little hard at first, the hand is a little shaky, and something about the lines indicate that it was slow writing. The slight wobble to his words for such a slight phrase might have been a struggle.

_ I don’t like berrys.  _

So he can write. She wonders how much of this was done in the speech pathologist's office. Even a note or two a week would be nice. It's messy handwriting, not just average-messy but almost like he can barely hold a pen, maybe that's what stopped him before.

She snorts to herself, her hand lifting to pat his arm comfortingly. He doesn’t roll over. But she knows he’s awake. 

That’s all it says. Somehow it means so much. She pictures those first few weeks together and the mountain of them she had brought home each day, that he would manfully try to finish every time he came home to her. 

He hadn’t even liked them. Poor thing. 

He did it because she was trying. Her feelings had mattered to him.

Rey sets the note aside and spoons behind him, snuggling his broad back. Pressing her lips to  _ his _ nape. He’s not small in her arms, but the little way he moves against her makes him feel more manageable.

“Thank you for eating them, Alpha,” Rey leans up to press a kiss to his cheek, “I had gathered them all for you.”

His hand comes up to cover one of hers. It’s the only movement he makes to acknowledge she’s even there. That and one, gentle squeeze. 

* * *

Leia takes Rey out shopping for clothes for her appointments with Ben. Apparently haunting her house wasn’t something that required this trip. Appointments mean Rey needs skirts, perhaps wool trousers too. Ben actually smiles when Leia insists upon it at the breakfast table and catches Rey’s eye with a laugh. Humoring his mother. Appealing to his wife. 

It’s so sweet that Rey doesn’t resist.

Rey hangs back in the store. Leia seems to know exactly what she’s doing. Rey’s never picked out clothes for herself. All of hers belonged to someone else first. 

Ben had given her another twenty for this trip. She isn’t thinking about how else to spend it. She watches Leia flip through hangers on a rack and wonders how to see herself in these clothes. But at least she’s not calculating gas money in her head from the bill in her jacket pocket. 

“My son likes you.”

Rey bites her lip and raises her eyebrows. 

Leia doesn’t look at her.

“All of this. He bends for you. Ben is very set in his ways.”

Rey stuffs her hands awkwardly in his pockets. She’s not sure, by Leia’s tone, if his mother particularly likes this. It’s at least kind for skimming over what  _ all of this _ meant.

Leia pauses midway through sliding a rejected garment to the far side of the clothing rack.

“It means he cares about you.”

Leia slips a hanger off the bar and holds up a soft orange dress. It’s pretty, grown-up looking, and actually looks like it belongs on a woman going to an appointment.

“Ben avoids situations that make him uncomfortable. But if he’s doing this, you must know it’s for you. So if you’re uncomfortable, don’t give up on it. Be uncomfortable, and try anyway. Because that’s what he’s doing for you. Closest thing I have to faith is that it will get easier over time.”

* * *

Rey wakes to something being slid under her collar, a piece of paper up against her nape. 

Ben’s already resting himself innocently at her side, not even looking at her, once her arms manage to twist behind her back and dig the note free. She burrows into his side even as he pretends he didn’t drop the message himself. Instead he continues taking off his watch and shoes before going to bed, like any other night.

With a soft sound of satisfaction before it’s even read, she unfolds the missive:

_ You are always pretty. _

Her heart seizes a little. The note curls up in her fingers like she’s keeping the sentiment from getting away. A faint blush glows across her cheeks. She hopes the lamplight is low enough that he doesn’t see. But what if he sees? They’re married. Mated. And, she shifts next to him with a hint of discomfort, it’s not like she has so much beauty that he’d do anything about it. 

Ben rolls onto his side when hiding in the pillow doesn’t yield a reaction he can sneak an observation of. He clearly wants one, even from a peek. Mostly because even though he’s pretending he’s just climbing into bed: he’s still got his clothes on. 

It’s so transparent it scares her a little. That he really could—like her—again.

Blushing, Rey holds the note to her chest and puzzles at his searching expression. 

Her confusion feeds his, and he sits up, clearly wondering why the compliment baffles her. 

“Why don’t—you ever touch me?” she clears her throat after faltering on her words. She’s not sure the notes can get that detail yet. The paper plastered to her chest is hardly an invitation. He clears his throat and bows his head closer. 

He gets so close to her with his lips, full and lush and so  _ hers _ that they’re taunting her, but he uses that distraction to brush his fingers up her neck. 

She flinches straight away. 

Ben lifts his hand from her skin and keeps it open and raised. He lets out a sigh that makes her look at herself, her reaction.  _ Because.  _

Because the shivering that won’t stop. And how stiff her limbs are. How how when he gets close, she acts like frightened prey, waiting for him to maul, and he waits for—

— _ for her to ask, _ it seems. 

He’s shown his example. 

Rey licks her lips and nods. It wasn’t just disinterest this whole time. Or the biological demands that seemed to plague his psyche. It was an assumption of hers, of his insistence if he truly wanted it, that this was always his right to take. She hadn’t seen the power he was giving her. She never really asked for it until it was a lie. 

Rey clutches her airy nightgown in her fists and doesn’t lift her eyes. Somehow both fast and halting, she seizes his hand and draws it to her body. Brushing his rough skin along her sternum. 

Ben doesn’t move. But he watches her with sharp interest as she coaxingly explores her body with his touch. 

Rey bites her tongue and rolls him onto his back. She awkwardly shucks off his shirt, undershirt tangled with it, and bares his chest. 

Her body goes gently down to rest over his. 

Then she remembers how considerate he’s been to her desires. 

“Ben, do you want me to—”

His hands cover hers and he nods eagerly before she can finish the question. She smiles in relief. Even though it should anger her that they’ve probably both wanted this for much longer than they could say. It’s like letting go of a breath. Her shoulders slump and she squeezes onto his hands as if she made a jump she didn’t think she could clear. 

Then she realizes, after a minute or two just lying half-on top of him and not moving, that she’s supposed to  _ do _ something.

“I don’t know anything about sex,” she admits after a moment of overwhelming curiosity, her chest soft against his. 

She’d never really processed this. It, when spoken of, was secret and lascivious. Or dangerous, when it was not spoken of but merely referred to. What was surprising about the convent, maybe made real to Rey by seeing the polaroid of the new girl lounging with her bare thighs out of her habit, was that for an order of sacred, untouched wombs, some of the girls certainly weren’t virgins. They were sent there specifically for not  _ being _ virgins. Rey thought they were all like her. Preserved under glass before they’d had the chance to experience anything. 

Sex was something that was had when a woman allowed a man to, was what she surmised, but already her heat had overpowered that three times. She couldn’t take what her instincts brought out and use them as her own, exactly, but she knew there was this second side that she had to learn to access...

Ben shakes his head like he’s not particularly bothered by this, a kind, lazy smile on his face. Then there’s a shrug, as if he’s not one who can judge. She wonders what he knew of sex before her. If he’d ever had an Omega. Did he truly know what he was denying himself? 

“So help me, a little bit?” she tilts her head at him. “It’s not that I didn’t want you, I just got scared.”

There’s honey-golden pleasure from something she had not indulged in for a long time: Ben as a confessor makes her feel seen, feel real. Not judged or abandoned or wrong. If she could place one real thing about herself in his hands, she could feel as she does now, and see the calm in his eyes as he understood her finally. 

That she had not meant to reject him. 

First he raises his hands to give her a visual of them moving towards her, and forgoing the sweet, good boy he was just to palm her ass when they reach her skin. She shivers but keeps looking in his eyes, knowing they are inviting touch now, and he knows it too. Hopefully he’ll be a little more persistent with her. Give that push she was too scared to ask for. 

He squeezes her cheeks in both hands, feeling her, a low growl in his throat. 

That’s her push she was waiting for. 

Rey runs her hands down his chest. It’s pale and massive. Her fingers try to map it but they are too small. She sits back as he massages her bum and draws her eyes across his skin. Heat didn’t call for careful observation. In many ways it was how she pictured sex in the rough outline she ever dared imagine it: him claiming her, her lying to take him. Sketchy and shadowed. She is fascinated in how much he feels like a stranger to her, not in spirit but in body, caught in fevered glimpses before now. 

She rolls back from his stomach to his hips and presses her lips to his sternum. They’ve had every kind of hard and fast now, after three heats. Well, two and some change. The second time they’d only had the once before Rey was dragged off to the infirmary. 

It’s automatic how kisses pepper across his collarbones and down the curves of his chest. 

Rey sloppily lifts her head from his chest. Groping blindly at the bedside table, she swipes up an onyx-beaded rosary from the doily on top. 

Ben swallows as she wraps it in her fist and drags the cold beads across his chest. 

“Can I try to please you? I want to go first.”

She settles her hands on his shoulders and clambers into his lap. Her knees dig into the mattress as she kneels over him. 

Ben nods, allowing her everything. 

Her heart breaks for a moment. Is this what he wants, or what she wants?

“Don’t just let me. Is this what you want?”

Sometimes Ben would need more questions. Sometimes she would have to look harder. Listen closer. 

She was going to try.

Ben pauses, tense like it’s a tougher question, then pulls her in for a kiss. He wants that. She gives it. 

Ben shivers as she touches across his chest with just her fingers this time and nods. 

She smiles and kisses him this time, her hands, one wrapped in the rosary, cupping his cheeks. 

“You deserve to feel good. We can make each other feel amazing, Alpha. I want my cunt to be your home.”

Ben whimpers, which with his voice sounds like paper crumpling up. Just this fragile sound that makes her weak for him. 

Rey licks her lips and crawls down his body.

“You’re such a good boy. So patient. Waiting for me.”

She kisses his stomach as he cards his hands into her hair. 

His hips flinch as she unbuckles his belt. She read about this act in a book that came from under Bazine’s bed. A few books.

“It’s okay, I’m your wife.”

Rey kisses his stomach as it tenses and flutters when she eases his pants down his hips. She takes her seat between his knees and looks at his naked cock. Not her Alpha’s cock. Her husband’s. 

“Are you scared to cum in my mouth?”

He looks up at her from between his fingers and gives a nod.

“Do you want me to stop? We can stop.”

Ben takes a shaky breath and shakes his head.

“I can corrupt you, you good Catholic boy?”

Ben drops his hands and fists them in the sheets and nods at her: like he’s ready, like he’s eager. Rey salivates at how boldly he chooses this.

“Just remember, we’re married,” she presses her lips to him, wanting to reward his goodness somehow, and feel his wickedness under her tongue. “It’s not so-so bad.”

Her tongue drags up his skin and he bucks against her. 

Rey bites her lower lip as she sits back. He whines. Already converted. He’s so innocent. Alphas were supposed to be brutal, dominant. And there was no question of that when her heat came: how Ben  _ owned _ her.

But she likes this balance they’re discovering. 

A smile graces her expression as she takes the rosary from her fist and wraps a few lengths around his hard cock, pulling it up to her mouth like a puppet on a string. Her fingers cover the beads and slide them up and down his length, warm from his skin, then cool again, until he groans. 

Rey holds back a proud laugh as she snuggles his tip into her mouth. 

“Do you think this always goes in my womb?”

Ben is only an Alpha. At the mention of  _ womb _ he almost breaks the bed underneath them with a hungry thrash.  _ Her _ womb. She sits back until he steadies so no one gets hurt, but reclaims her control of him with a hand on his bare belly.

“No. This goes in my mouth. This goes down my throat.”

He trembles as she licks his swollen head, tightening the beaded chain around him until he gasps.

Rey purses her lips at him. She wants this debauchery. She wants him to cum not for her heat, not to make babies, but because he wants her and wants this:

_ “Please.” _

He gives.

* * *

  
  


The last time she sat in a chair beside Ben with this much tension in her body was when he was given the ultimatum to marry her or to throw her out into the world. Ben made that decision for them. It bubbled as resentment inside her that she never got to choose for herself. But Ben’s eyes and his hands and his smell always had her wanting him. It’s a queasy, guilty feeling that if offered her choice this life could have been as much her own doing. 

Ben’s knee bounces as they wait for the therapist to come in. Rey almost laughed at Jannah adding it to their schedule of appointments. 

_ “You’re going to get him talking  _ that  _ quickly?” _

Jannah’s correction was gentle, but firm. 

“No. It’s about your progress. It’s good to get to know your counselor as we work with him—especially in the beginning stages. Ben was in a devastating accident, whether he can communicate it yet or not. There’s a lot to work to repair, regrow. Vocabulary, grammatical structures, syntax...”

Rey’s chest is buzzing with anxiety. She’s not exactly prepared to teach these things either. As the one doing the talking for both of them, what if she scares Ben off with things she thinks she knows to be true about them? What if he doesn’t agree, and the wedge gets deeper.

The door opens so swiftly she can’t attach who walks in to what she had imagined.

Their therapist is young. She hadn’t anticipated that. She had pictured some old European man who would look them over and tell them they were sexually perverted. What’s notable are three raised scars across his face from the center of his brow sweeping to one cheek. 

And it fills the room so quickly Rey softens in automatic comfort.

He’s an Omega. 

She’s never met a male Omega. 

He smiles, his presence almost hanging back from the expectation that he was the most important figure in the room, and casualness that shatters her dreadful anticipation of this appointment. 

“You can call me Finn.”

Despite Jannah, and everyone at the facility, insisting on first names, it’s still a surprise to her. She was boxed in to the utmost formality and prepared to live the rest of her life that way. This is casual, and intimate, and kind.

“Finn,” she repeats back in quiet awe, sort of expecting to step into some matronly, submissive  _ ‘yes doctor, no doctor’ _ the whole appointment while Ben sat next to her in silence. “I’m Rey, this is my husband Ben.”

Ben waves in one swift sweep over the arm of his chair, knee stilling only long enough to complete the arc before bouncing frenetically again. 

Finn’s not quick to talk. He observes them patiently, maybe reading more from their body language than Rey is even conscious of. She sits up a little straighter. His smile returns on a soft laugh. 

“How are we feeling about this whole arrangement?”

“A little doubtful of how this is going to work, honestly.”

She knows he’s trying to help but all of this is scary, and at least he has the kind of presence that makes honesty fall out of her faster than she can stop it. That’s already making her try and halt her words. 

But Ben sits beside her. Obviously uncomfortable.

So she can bear it a little longer.

Finn seems to take this in stride.

“I hate to say it’ll feel that way for a while. But I’m fluent in signing, as Jannah told you I work with the children in the school here, so this is a good exercise to practice when you two have had more lessons behind you. Ben, how are you feeling about this?”

Rey pivots to Ben as if she’s meant to translate his reaction: but he stills her with a hand. Ben sits up and furrows his brow, letting out a slow breath, and then shrugs at Finn. 

Finn nods. Discerning so much from the gesture of a stranger. 

But there was a lot of that gesture, a lot that Rey hadn’t even processed when she was about to rush in to speak for her husband and say  _ anxious, uncomfortable, frustrated— _

Ben’s posture is loose and relaxed. Open. His expression is engaged and a little hopeful. The lift of his shoulders is not defensive: it moves through him like anything could happen.

Finn observes this with open eyes and nods.

Rey had meant to protect Ben like everyone else in his life had. He’d lost his speech at some horrible place that hurt him for his own good. He’d been at that convent for years with Luke controlling him from the fear of how disastrous his presence could be in the outside world. Leia was at a loss of what to do with Ben, his return home seemed to inspire her to just let him stay in the nest forever. Rey was comfortable to tend him there if it meant he wasn’t sad. They didn’t hope for Ben.

But Ben hoped for himself and nobody saw it.

She trembles and swallows and knows she loves him and knows she needs to do this for him.

“What scares me is, if we fully understand each other, maybe we find out how little we know about each other at all.”

“Do you think that’ll be damaging to your relationship?”

Rey licks her lips. “Not if I know Ben. I want to know Ben. But if Ben knows me—”

She shouldn’t be stomping on the hope that this could work. But the way that this marriage has obscured her made her feel safe. All her life she was taught she was temptation: she was the walking vessel of Alpha’s sins. Rey didn’t want to believe she was a bad person. But what if her devout, sweet husband found out she was. Other than the love of her friends making her destroy it: Rey could have died in that cabin with her garden. She hadn’t lied when she said this place was killing them. But it might have done it slowly if she hardened herself enough to not look at any of the other girls again.

She saved her friends because she wanted to care about something, even if for the last time. Maybe she could care enough to destroy herself once again. 

Ben shifts in his chair with his brows raised, surprised that she felt this way. His lips are slightly agape and he, once fidgeting and nervous and now impatient to begin, reaches for her arm gently. 

The betrayal that sealed their mating bond had thrown up every wall they’d had control of. But his feelings, her mate’s feelings, fill her as the feelings of her sister’s once did. 

She’d missed them. Since she lost them she’d felt alone. 

_ But I do know you. _

It’s a flood, all at once, and she realizes the depth to which that bond was broken since that night. She was never supposed to feel alone. 

Rey folds at the waist and bites her lip. Ben’s hand fans across her shoulder blade. It hits in violent waves, the feeling that was supposed to make sense and never came. Ben is her mate. He is hers. They protect each other.

Finn watches this exchange with a quiet respect for the very chaotic surge of emotions a few simple questions brought on. 

“I guess the real question is: are you two ready to speak to each other?”

They know this gesture. They’ve both done it their whole lives to strangers on a pew. They’ve never done it with the most important person in their lives. When Finn asks them this, they reach for each other’s hands like they have been asked to pray together. 

They don’t have to look at him. They look at each other. Clasping hands. No more hiding.

Together they nod. Together they answer. 

They’re ready to speak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys! Novitiate is over. I'm sad. This was such a cool part of my summer: before it's the end, I think we need commandments. Comment below or tweet me @secretreylo "Thou shall knot__." and I'll share them.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much to Trixie for looking at this for me and to Bible Study for hyping me up!


End file.
